Hence while a faith in transmigration imposes but few restrictions on the diet of a savage, since it leaves him free to partake of the flesh of every sort of animals but one, the creed of Empedocles logically cut him off from a flesh diet altogether and compelled him to live on vegetables alone; indeed, if he had been rigidly logical, he must have denied himself the use of vegetables also and perished of hunger, since on his theory vegetables as well as animals may house the souls of the dead.(906) However, like a wise man he sacrificed logic to life, and contented himself with forbidding his disciples the use of a few vegetables, such as beans and laurels,(907) while he suffered them to browse freely on all the rest. (M221) So far as we can gather the real opinions of Pythagoras and Empedocles from the traditional history of the one and the miserably mutilated writings of the other, they seem both, like Buddha, with whom they had much in common, to have used the old savage doctrine of the transmigration of souls mainly as a handle by which to impress on the minds of their followers the necessity of leading an innocent, pure, and even ascetic life in this world as the only means of ensuring a blissful or at all events an untroubled eternity in a world to come.(908) At least this is fairly certain for Empedocles, whose views are comparatively well known to us through the fragments of his philosophical writings. From these utterances of his, the genuineness of which seems to be beyond suspicion, we gather that the psychology of Empedocles was a curious blend of savagery and mysticism. He regarded the incarnation of the human soul in a body of any sort as a punishment for sin, a degradation, a fall from heaven, an exile from God, a banishment from a world of bliss to a world of woe.(909) He describes the earth as a cavern,(910) a joyless land, where men wander in darkness, a prey to murder and revenge, to swarms of foul fiends, to wasting sickness and decay.(911) He speaks with pity and contempt of the life of mortals as a wretched and miserable existence, begotten of strife and sighs and prolonged as a punishment for their sins through a series of transmigrations, until, by the exercise of virtue, they have been born again as prophets, poets, physicians, and princes, and so return at last to communion with the gods to live thenceforth free from pain and sorrow, immortal, incorruptible, divine.(912) This view of human destiny, this passionate scorn poured on the present world, this ecstatic aspiration after a blissful eternity, the reward of virtue in a world to come, are very alien from the cheerful serenity, the calm rationalism of the ordinary Greek attitude towards existence on earth.(913) In his profound conviction of the manifold sufferings inseparable from mortality, in his longing to put off the burden of the body or what he calls “the garment of flesh,”(914) in his tenderness for the lower animals and his