Hindu speculation has never passed through the materialistic phase, and the doctrine that the soul is annihilated at death is extremely rare in India.  Even rarer perhaps is the doctrine that it usually enters on a permanent existence, happy or otherwise.  The idea underlying the transmigration theory is that every state which we call existence must come to an end.  If the soul can be isolated from all the accidents and accessories attaching to it, then there may be a state of permanence and peace but not a state comparable with human existence, however enlarged and glorified.  But why does not this conviction of impermanence lead to the simpler conclusion that the end of physical life is the end of all life?  Because the Hindus have an equally strong conviction of continuity:  everything passes away and changes but it is not true to say of anything that it arises from nothing or passes into nothing.  If human organisms (or any other organisms) are mere machines, if there is nothing more to be said about a corpse than about a smashed watch, then (the Hindu thinks) the universe is not continuous.  Its continuity means for him that there is something which eternally manifests itself in perishable forms but does not perish with them any more than water when a pitcher is broken or fire that passes from the wood it has consumed to fresh fuel.

These metaphors suggest that the doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation does not promise what we call personal immortality.  I confess that I cannot understand how there can be personality in the ordinary human sense without a body.  When we think of a friend, we think of a body and a character, thoughts and feelings, all of them connected with that body and many of them conditioned by it.  But the immortal soul is commonly esteemed to be something equally present in a new born babe, a youth and an old man.  If so, it cannot be a personality in the ordinary sense, for no one could recognize the spirit of a departed friend, if it is something which was present in him the day he was born and different from all the characteristics which he acquired during life.  The belief that we shall recognize our friends in another world assumes that these characteristics are immortal, but it is hard to understand how they can be so, especially as it is also assumed that there is nothing immortal in a dog, which possesses affection and intelligence, but that there is something immortal in a new born infant which cannot be said to possess either.

In one way metempsychosis raises insuperable difficulties to the survival of personality, for if you become someone else, especially an animal, you are no longer yourself according to any ordinary use of language.  But one of the principal forms taken by the doctrine in India makes a modified survival intelligible.  For it is held that a new born child brings with it as a result of actions done in previous lives certain predispositions and these after being developed and modified in the course of that child’s life are transmitted to its next existence.