"There's lifeless matter. Add the power of shaping, And you've the crystal: add again the organs Wherewith to subdue sustenance to the form And manner of one's self, and you've the plant: Add power of motion, senses, and so forth, And you've all kinds of beasts: suppose a pig. To pig add reason, foresight, and such stuff, Then you have man. What shall, we add to man To bring him higher?" Freedom from the load of clay, emancipation of the spirit into the full range and masterdom of a spirit's powers! Fourthly, many strong similarities between our entrance into this world and our departure out of it would make us believe that death is but another and higher birth.6 Any one acquainted with the state of an unborn infant deriving its sole nutriment, its very existence, from its vascular connection with its mother could hardly imagine that its separation from its mother would introduce it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have, in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination, and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere, "Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the womb." The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme, "What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of eternity." Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence, here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences, "shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago. Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the 6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und Anferstehung. 7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the Pre existence of Souls. connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition, as we have lived through the past ones.