(1) It is a mere phrase.  If to create means to produce something out of nothing, then we have never seen such an act and to ascribe a sudden appearance to such an act is really no explanation.  Perhaps an act of imagination or a dream may justly be called a creation, but the relation between a soul and its Creator is not usually regarded as similar to the relation between a mind and its fancies.

(2) The responsibility of God for the evil of the world seems to be greatly increased, if he is directly responsible for every birth of a child in unhappy conditions.

(3) Animals are not supposed to have souls.  Therefore the production of an animal’s mind is not explained by this theory and it seems to be assumed that such a complex mind ag a dog’s can be explained as a function of matter, whereas there is something in a child which cannot be so explained.

(4) If a new immortal soul is created every time a birth takes place, the universe must be receiving incalculably large additions.  For some philosophies such an idea is impossible. (See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 502.  “The universe is incapable of increase.  And to suppose a constant supply of new souls, none of which ever perished, would clearly land us in the end in an insuperable difficulty.”) But even if we do not admit that it is impossible, it at least destroys all analogy between the material and spiritual worlds.  If all the bodies that ever lived continued to exist separately after death, the congestion would be unthinkable.  Is a corresponding congestion in the spiritual world really thinkable?]

[Footnote 36:  This seems to be the view of the Chandogya Up.  VI. 12.  As the whole world is a manifestation ol Brahman, so is the great banyan tree a manifestation of the subtle essence which is also present in its minute seeds.]

[Footnote 37:  The Brihad Ar.  Up. knows of samsara and karma but as matters of deep philosophy and not for the vulgar:  but in the Buddhist Pitakas they are assumed as universally accepted.  The doctrine must therefore have been popularized after the composition of the Upanishad.  But some allowance must be made for the fact that the Upanishads and the earliest versions of the Buddhist Suttas were produced in different parts of India.]

[Footnote 38:  Yet many instances are quoted from Celtic and Teutonic folklore to the effect that birds and butterflies are human souls, and Caesar’s remarks about the Druids may not be wholly wrong.]

[Footnote 39:  Several other Europeans of eminence have let their minds play with the ideas of metempsychosis, pre-existence and karma, as for instance Giordano Bruno, Swedenborg, Goethe, Lessing, Lavater, Herder, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, von Helmont, Lichtenberg and in England such different spirits as Hume and Wordsworth.  It would appear that towards the end of the eighteenth century these ideas were popular in some literary circles on the continent.  See Bertholet, The