this incorruptible particle takes its leave of it, and returns to the grand ocean of ether, if not retained by its union with the lunar air:  it is this air or gas, which, retaining the shape of the body, becomes a phantom or ghost, the perfect representation of the deceased.  The Greeks called this phantom the image or idol of the soul; the Pythagoreans, its chariot, its frame; and the Rabbinical school, its vessel, or boat.  When a man had conducted himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation took place:  the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, and the ether returned to the fixed sphere, that is, to God:  for the fixed heaven, says Macrobius, was by many called by the name of God (c. 14).  If a man had not lived virtuously, the soul remained on earth to undergo purification, and was to wander to and fro, like the ghosts of Homer, to whom this doctrine must have been known, since he wrote after the time of Pherecydes and Pythagoras, who were its promulgators in Greece.  Herodotus upon this occasion says, that the whole romance of the soul and its transmigrations was invented by the Egyptians, and propagated in Greece by men, who pretended to be its authors.  I know their names, adds he, but shall not mention them (lib. 2).  Cicero, however, has positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of Pythagoras.  Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16.  Now admitting that this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for Solomon’s treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before Pherecydes.  ‘Who knoweth,’ said he, ’the spirit of a man that it goeth upwards?  I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.  For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them:  as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast:  for all is vanity.’” Eccles. c. iii:  v. 18.

And such had been the opinion of Moses, as a translator of Herodotus (M.  Archer of the Academy of Inscriptions) justly observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among the Hebrews till their intercourse with the Assyrians.  In other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly analysed, appears to be merely a system of physics badly understood.

“Hence, also its transmigrations, known by the name of metempsychosis, that is, the passage of the vital principle from one body to another; an idea which arose from the real transmigration of the material elements.  And behold, ye Indians, ye Boudhists, ye Christians, ye Mussulmans! whence are derived all your opinions on the spirituality of the soul; behold what was the source of the dreams of Pythagoras and Plato, your masters, who were themselves but the echoes of another, the last sect of visionary philosophers, which we will proceed to examine.