(M227) The old savage doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which Empedocles furbished up and passed off on his disciples as a philosophical tenet, was afterwards countenanced, if not expressly affirmed, by another Greek philosopher of a very different stamp, who united, as no one else has ever done in the same degree, the highest capacity for abstract thought with the most exquisite literary genius. But if he borrowed the doctrine from savagery, Plato, like his two predecessors, detached it from its rude original setting and fitted it into an edifying moral scheme of retributive justice. For he held that the transmigration of human souls after death into the bodies of animals is a punishment or degradation entailed on the souls by the weaknesses to which they had been subject or the vices to which they had been addicted in life, and that the kind of animal into which a peccant soul transmigrates is appropriate to the degree and nature of its weakness or guilt. Thus, for example, the souls of gluttons, sots, and rakes pass into the bodies of asses; the souls of robbers and tyrants are born again in wolves and hawks; the souls of sober quiet people, untinctured by philosophy, come to life as bees and ants; a bad poet may turn at death into a swan or a nightingale; and a bad jester into an ape. Nothing but a rigid practice of the highest virtue and a single-minded devotion to abstract truth will avail to restore such degraded souls to their human dignity and finally raise them to communion with the gods.(923) Though the passages in which these views are set forth have a mythical colouring and are, like all Plato’s writings, couched in dramatic form and put into the mouths of others, we need not seriously doubt that they represent the real opinion of the philosopher himself.(924) It is interesting and instructive to meet with the old savage theory of the transmigration of souls thus masquerading under a flowing drapery of morality and sparkling with the gems of Attic eloquence in the philosophic system of a great Greek thinker. So curiously alike may be the solutions which the highest and the lowest intellects offer of those profound problems which in all ages have engaged the curiosity and baffled the ingenuity of mankind.(925) CHAPTER XVII. TYPES OF ANIMAL SACRAMENT. § 1. The Egyptian and the Aino Types of Sacrament.