Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience. But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion. The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied, "I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been shot 7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt. 8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora. passed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those passes which the conductors of railroad trains give their passengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass on their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment "to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and experiences drained before.