Village books

We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers,
and greengrocers, almost ad libitum, but these are low developments,
and correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those of us again
who are not highly enough organized to have grown a solicitor or
banker can generally repair the loss of whatever social organization
they may possess as freely as lizards are said to grow new tails;
but this with the higher social, as well as organic, developments is
only possible to a very limited extent.
The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls--a
doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part
easy corollaries--crops up no matter in what direction we allow our
thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body
as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have
transmigrated together, far from it; but that, as we can often
recognize a transmigrated mind in an alien body, so we not less
often see a body that is clearly only a transmigration, linked on to
someone else's new and alien soul.


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