"He who has not become ripe in one form of humanity is put into the experience again, and, some time or other, must be perfected." "I am not ashamed of my half-brothers the brutes; on the contrary, so far as I am concerned, I am a great advocate of metempsychosis. I believe for a certainty that they will ascend to a higher grade of being, and am unable to understand how anyone can object to this hypothesis, which seems to have the analogy of the whole creation in its favour." Sir Walter Scott had such vivid memories of his past lives that they compelled a belief in pre-existence. Instances of this belief may be found in _The Life of Scott_, by Lockhart (vol. 7, p. 114, first edition). According to Schlegel: "Nature is nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which, step by step, leads upward, or rather is carried from the abyss of eternal death up to the apex of life." (_AEsthetic and Miscellaneous Works_; and, _The Philosophy of History_.) Shelley held a firm belief in Reincarnation: "It is not the less certain, notwithstanding the cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence. The doctrine is far more ancient than the times of Plato," (Dowden's _Life of Shelley_, vol. 1, p. 82.) Schopenhauer adopted the idea of Reincarnation which he had found in the _Upanishads_; regarding this portion of his teaching, his contemporaries and followers set up a kind of conspiracy of silence. In _Parerga and Paralipomena_, vol. 2, chap. 15, _Essay on Religions_, he says: "I have said that the combination of the _Old Testament_ with the _New_ gives rise to absurdities. As an example, I may cite the Christian doctrine of Predestination and Grace as formulated by Augustine and adopted from him by Luther, according to which one man is endowed with grace and another is not. Grace thus comes to be a privilege received at birth and brought ready into the world.... What is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine may be traced to the idea contained in the _Old Testament_, that man is the creation of an external will which called him into existence out of nothing. It is quite true that genuine moral excellence is really innate; but the meaning of the Christian doctrine is expressed in another and more rational way by the theory of Metempsychosis, common to Brahmans and Buddhists. According to this theory, the qualities which distinguish one man from another are received at birth, _i.e._, are brought from another world and a former life; these qualities are not an external gift of grace, but are the fruits of the acts committed in that other world....