Even in antiquity, there were some who suspected that at the bottom of the Pythagorean propaganda was the wish to make men more humane. Without taking that view, it may be granted that a strong love of animals prepares the mind to think of them as not so very different from men. A thing that tends in the same direction is the unfavourable comparison of some men with some beasts: the sort of sentiment which made Madame de Staël say that the more she knew of men the more she liked dogs. Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. The homogeneity of living things is one of the very old beliefs from which we strayed and to which we are returning. Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which they bent to their own purposes. Thus Socrates borrowed from Pythagoras when he suggested that imperfect and earth-bound spirits might be re-incorporated in animals whose conventionally ascribed characteristics corresponded with their own moral natures. Unjust, tyrannical, and violent men would become wolves, hawks, and kites, while good commonplace people—virtuous Philistines—would take better forms, such as ants, bees, and wasps, all of which live harmoniously in communities. It is pleasant to find that Socrates did justice to that intelligent insect, the undeservedly aspersed wasp. Men who are good in all respects save the highest, may re-assume human forms. Socrates does not explain why it is that humanity progresses so slowly if it is always being recruited from such good material? He passes on from these righteous men to the super-excellent man to whom alone he allots translation into a divine and wholly immaterial sphere; he it is who departs from this world completely pure of earthly dross; who cannot be moved by ill-fortune, poverty, disgrace; who has “overcome the world” in the Pauline sense, who has died while living, in the Indian sense. Though Socrates does not say so, it is this super-excellent man who really convinces him of the immortality of the soul according to the meaning which we attach to these words.