All religious doctrines, especially theories about the soul, are matters of temperament.  A race with more power of will and more delight in life might have held that the soul is the one agent that can stand firm and unshaken midst the flux of circumstance.  The intelligent but passive Hindu sees clearly that whatever illusions the soul may have, it really passes on like everything else and continueth not in one stay.  He is disposed to think of it not as created with the birth of the body, but as a drop drawn from some ocean to which it is destined to return.  As a rule he considers it to be immortal but he does not emphasize or value personality in our sense.  In previous births he has already been a great many persons and he will be a great many more.  Whatever may be the thread between these existences it is not individuality.  And what he craves is not eternal personal activity, but unbroken rest in which personality, even if supposed to continue, can have little meaning.

The character of the successive appearances or tenements of the soul is determined by the law of Karma, which even more than metempsychosis is the basis of Indian ideas about the universe.  Karma is best known as a term of the Buddhists, who are largely responsible both for the definition and wide diffusion of the doctrine.  But the idea is Brahmanic as well as Buddhist and occurs in well-known passages of the Upanishads, where it is laid down that as a man acts so shall he be in the next life[132].  The word (which means simply deed) is the accepted abbreviation for the doctrine that all deeds bring upon the doer an accurately proportionate consequence either in this existence, or, more often, in a future birth.  At the end of a man’s life his character or personality is practically the sum of his acts, and when extraneous circumstances such as worldly position disappear, the soul is left with nothing but these acts and the character they have formed as, in Indian language, the fruit of life and it is these acts and this character which determine its next tenement.  That tenement is simply the home which it is able to occupy in virtue of the configuration and qualities which it has induced in itself.  It cannot complain.

One aspect of the theory of Samsara which is important for the whole history of Indian thought is its tendency towards pessimism.  This tendency is specially definite and dogmatic in Buddhism, but it is a marked characteristic of the Indian temperament and appears in almost every form of devotion and speculation.  What salvation or the desire to be saved is to the ordinary Protestant, Mukti or Moksha, deliverance, is to the ordinary Hindu.  In Buddhism this desire is given a dogmatic basis for it is declared that all existence in all possible worlds necessarily involves dukkha or suffering[133] and this view seems to have met with popular as well as philosophic assent.  But the desire for release and deliverance is based less on a contemplation of the woes of life than on