and more than others they insisted on the principle that everything has a cause.  They held that the sexual act creates the conditions in which a new life appears but is not an adequate cause for the new life itself.  And unless we accept a materialist explanation of human nature, this argument is sound:  unless we admit that mind is merely a function of matter, the birth of a mind is not explicable as a mere process of cell development:  something pre-existent must act upon the cells.

Europeans in discussing such questions as the nature of the soul and immortality are prone to concentrate their attention on death and neglect the phenomena of birth, which surely are equally important.  For if a soul survives the death of this complex of cells which is called the body, its origin and development must, according to all analogy, be different from those of the perishable body.  Orthodox theology deals with the problem by saying that God creates a new soul every time a child is born[35] but free discussion usually ignores it and taking an adult as he is, asks what are the chances that any part of him survives death.  Yet the questions, what is destroyed at death and how and why, are closely connected with the questions what comes into existence at birth and how and why.  This second series of questions is hard enough, but it has this advantage over the first that whereas death abruptly closes the road and we cannot follow the soul one inch on its journey beyond, the portals of birth are a less absolute frontier.  We know that every child has passed through stages in which it could hardly be called a child.  The earliest phase consists of two cells, which unite and then proceed to subdivide and grow.  The mystery of the process by which they assume a human form is not explained by scientific or theological phrases.  The complete individual is assuredly not contained in the first germ.  The microscope cannot find it there and to say that it is there potentially, merely means that we know the germ will develop in a certain way.  To say that a force is manifesting itself in the germ and assuming the shape which it chooses to take or must take is also merely a phrase and metaphor, but it seems to me to fit the facts[36].

The doctrines of pre-existence and transmigration (but not, I think, of karma which is purely Indian) are common among savages in Africa and America, nor is their wide distribution strange.  Savages commonly think that the soul wanders during sleep and that a dead man’s soul goes somewhere:  what more natural than to suppose that the soul of a new born infant comes from somewhere?  But among civilized peoples such ideas are in most cases due to Indian influence.  In India they seem indigenous to the soil and not imported by the Aryan invaders, for they are not clearly enunciated in the Rig Veda, nor formulated before the time of the Upanishads[37].  They were introduced by Buddhism to the Far East and their presence