existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. Its fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn‐out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which this new existence has arisen: they are _one_ being. To show the bridge between the two would certainly be the solution of a great riddle. The great truth which is expressed here has never been entirely unacknowledged, although it could not be reduced to its exact and correct meaning, which is only possible through the doctrine of the primacy and metaphysical nature of the will and the secondary, merely organic nature of the intellect. We find the doctrine of metempsychosis, springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad in the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind, nay, really as the teaching of all religions, with the exception of that of the Jews and the two which have proceeded from it: in the most subtle form, however, and coming nearest to the truth, as has already been mentioned, in Buddhism. Accordingly, while Christians console themselves with the thought of meeting again in another world, in which one regains one’s complete personality and knows oneself at once, in those other religions the meeting again is already going on now, only incognito. In the succession of births, and by virtue of metempsychosis or palingenesis, the persons who now stand in close connection or contact with us will also be born along with us at the next birth, and will have the same or analogous relations and sentiments towards us as now, whether these are of a friendly or a hostile description. (_Cf._, for example, Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” p. 162.) Recognition is certainly here limited to an obscure intimation, a reminiscence which cannot be brought to distinct consciousness, and refers to an infinitely distant time;—with the exception, however, of Buddha himself, who has the prerogative of distinctly knowing his own earlier births and those of others;—as this is described in the “Jâtaka.” But, in fact, if at favourable moment one contemplates, in a purely objective manner, the action of men in reality; the intuitive conviction is forced upon one that it not only is and remains constantly the same, according to the (Platonic) Idea, but also that the present generation, in its true inner nature, is precisely and substantially identical with every generation that has been before it. The question simply is in what this true being consists. The answer which my doctrine gives to this question is well known. The intuitive conviction referred to may be conceived as arising from the fact that the multiplying‐glasses, time and space, lose for a moment their effect. With reference to the universality of the belief in metempsychosis, Obry says rightly, in his excellent book, “_Du Nirvana Indien_,” p. 13: “_Cette