Instead therefore of pursuing the Thought of Simonides, I shall observe, that as he has exposed the vicious Part of Women from the Doctrine of Praeexistence, some of the ancient Philosophers have, in a manner, satirized the vicious Part of the human Species in general, from a Notion of the Souls Postexistence, if I may so call it; and that as Simonides describes Brutes entering into the Composition of Women, others have represented human Souls as entering into Brutes.  This is commonly termed the Doctrine of Transmigration, which supposes that human Souls, upon their leaving the Body, become the Souls of such Kinds of Brutes as they most resemble in their Manners; or to give an Account of it as Mr. Dryden has described it in his Translation of Pythagoras his Speech in the fifteenth Book of Ovid, where that Philosopher dissuades his Hearers from eating Flesh: 

  Thus all things are but alter’d, nothing dies,
  And here and there th’ unbody’d Spirit flies: 
  By Time, or Force, or Sickness dispossess’d,
  And lodges where it lights, in Bird or Beast,
  Or hunts without till ready Limbs it find,
  And actuates those according to their Kind: 
  From Tenement to Tenement is toss’d: 
  The Soul is still the same, the Figure only lost. 
    Then let not Piety be put to Flight,
  To please the Taste of Glutton-Appetite;
  But suffer inmate Souls secure to dwell,
  Lest from their Seats your Parents you expel;
  With rabid Hunger feed upon your Kind,
  Or from a Beast dislodge a Brothers Mind.

Plato in the Vision of Erus the Armenian, which I may possibly make the Subject of a future Speculation, records some beautiful Transmigrations; as that the Soul of Orpheus, who was musical, melancholy, and a Woman-hater, entered into a Swan; the Soul of Ajax, which was all Wrath and Fierceness, into a Lion; the Soul of Agamemnon, that was rapacious and imperial, into an Eagle; and the Soul of Thersites, who was a Mimick and a Buffoon, into a Monkey. [2]

Mr. Congreve, in a Prologue to one of his Comedies, [3] has touch’d upon this Doctrine with great Humour.

  Thus_ Aristotle’s Soul of old that was,
  May now be damn’d to animate an Ass;
  Or in this very House, for ought we know,
  Is doing painful Penance in some Beau.

I shall fill up this Paper with some Letters which my last Tuesdays Speculation has produced.  My following Correspondents will shew, what I there observed, that the Speculation of that Day affects only the lower Part of the Sex.

  From my House in the Strand, October 30, 1711.

  Mr.  SPECTATOR,