As to the method of transmission there are various theories, for in India the belief in reincarnation is not so much a dogma as an instinct innate in all and only occasionally justified by philosophers, not because it was disputed but because they felt bound to show that their own systems were compatible with it.  One explanation is that given by the Vedanta philosophy, according to which the soul is accompanied in its migrations by the Sukshmasarira or subtle body, a counterpart of the mortal body but transparent and invisible, though material.  The truth of this theory, as of all theories respecting ghosts and spirits, seems to me a matter for experimental verification, but the Vedanta recognizes that in our experience a personal individual existence is always connected with a physical substratum.

The Buddhist theory of rebirth is somewhat different, for Buddhism even in its later divagations rarely ceased to profess belief in Gotama’s doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul—­by which is meant no such thing as a permanent unchanging self or atman.  Buddhists are concerned to show that transmigration is not inconsistent with this denial of the atman.  The ordinary, and indeed inevitable translation of this word by soul leads to misunderstanding for we naturally interpret it as meaning that there is nothing which survives the death of the body and a fortiori nothing to transmigrate.  But in reality the denial of the atman applies to the living rather than to the dead.  It means that in a living man there is no permanent, unchangeable entity but only a series of mental states, and since human beings, although they have no atman, certainly exist in this present life, the absence of the atman is not in itself an obstacle to belief in a similar life after death or before birth.  Infancy, youth, age and the state immediately after death may form a series of which the last two are as intimately connected as any other two.  The Buddhist teaching is that when men die in whom the desire for another life exists—­as it exists in all except saints—­then desire, which is really the creator of the world, fashions another being, conditioned by the character and merits of the being which has just come to an end.  Life is like fire:  its very nature is to burn its fuel.  When one body dies, it is as if one piece of fuel were burnt:  the vital process passes on and recommences in another and so long as there is desire of life, the provision of fuel fails not.  Buddhist doctors have busied themselves with the question whether two successive lives are the same man or different men, and have illustrated the relationship by various analogies of things which seem to be the same and yet not the same, such as a child and an adult, milk and curds, or fire which spreads from a lamp and burns down a village, but, like the Brahmans, they do not discuss why the hypothesis of transmigration is necessary.  They had the same feeling for the continuity of nature,