fear of eating one’s grandparents but rather on the humane and enlightened feeling that all life is one and that men who devour beasts are not much above the level of the beasts who devour one another.  The feeling has grown stronger with time.  In the Vedas animal sacrifices are prescribed and they are even now used in the worship of some deities.  In the Epics the eating of meat is mentioned.  But the doctrine that it is wrong to take animal life was definitely adopted by Buddhism and gained strength with its diffusion.

One obvious objection to all theories of rebirth is that we do not remember our previous existences and that, if they are connected by no thread of memory, they are for all practical purposes the existences of different people.  But this want of memory affects not only past existences but the early phases of this existence.  Does any one deny his existence as an infant or embryo because he cannot remember it[42]?  And if a wrong could be done to an infant the effects of which would not be felt for twenty years, could it be said to be no concern of the infant because the person who will suffer in twenty years time will have no recollection that he was that infant?  And common opinion in Eastern Asia, not without occasional confirmation from Europe, denies the proposition that we cannot remember our former lives and asserts that those who take any pains to sharpen their spiritual faculties can remember them.  The evidence for such recollection seems to me better than the evidence for most spiritualistic phenomena[43].

Another objection comes from the facts of heredity.  On the whole we resemble our parents and ancestors in mind as well as in body.  A child often seems to be an obvious product of its parents and not a being come from outside and from another life.  This objection of course applies equally to the creation theory.  If the soul is created by an act of God, there seems to be no reason why it should be like the parents, or, if he causes it to be like them, he is made responsible for sending children into the world with vicious natures.  On the other hand if parents literally make a child, mind as well as body, there seems to be no reason why children should ever be unlike their parents, or brothers and sisters unlike one another, as they undoubtedly sometimes are.  An Indian would say that a soul[44] seeking rebirth carries with it certain potentialities of good and evil and can obtain embodiment only in a family offering the necessary conditions.  Hence to some extent it is natural that the child should be like its parents.  But the soul seeking rebirth is not completely fixed in form and stiff:  it is hampered and limited by the results of its previous life, but in many respects it may be flexible and free, ready to vary in response to its new environment.