27. The first of these beliefs was probably held by a portion of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and by most of the Jews. It was likewise held by many amongst the eastern nations. It formed indeed one of the two ways of imagining a future state, but it was of a very vague and dreary nature; and from the passage of Homer already quoted (Art. 14), we realise the longing supposed to be felt by the inhabitants of such a place to escape into a more substantial region. Unquestionably it was not a place in which practical men like the Jews, for instance, would wish to dwell, and yet no doubt it had great attraction for minds of a visionary and ecstatic nature, who held matter to be the source of evil. The return of the soul to its divine original, an Egyptian doctrine, the entrance into Nirvâ_n_a, proclaimed by Buddha, and the absorption into Buddha himself, proclaimed by some of his followers, are all proofs that a doctrine of this nature has peculiar fascinations for a dreamy order of minds. Nor must we analyse too rigidly the exact meaning and tendency of such doctrines, inasmuch as we cannot easily enter into the real feelings of those who propounded them, and who probably entertained conceptions which cannot adequately be expressed in words. 28. Coming now to the belief in a bodily future existence, it is remarkable that the doctrine of a transmigration of souls was extensively prevalent among all the nations we have named, if we except the Jews. It was believed in, as we have seen, by a large class of the Egyptians; it was introduced into Greece by Pythagoras and his followers; it is considered to have been from time immemorial a common property of the various religions of the extreme East; and it is recorded by Cæsar that the Druids believed in the same doctrine, although they confined the transmigration to human bodies.