VIII
How, Just as One Can Be More Royalist Than the King and More Devout Than the Pope, One Can Equally Be More of a Metempsychosist Than Pythagoras
Great as may be the joy of a shipwrecked man who has drifted for long days and nights lost on the ocean on a fragile raft, without mast or sail or compass and without hope, when he suddenly sights the shore which he has so long desired, such joy was as nothing compared with that which swept over Doctor Heraclius Gloss when, after being for so long tossed by the surge of the philosophies on the raft of uncertainty, he entered at length, triumphant and enlightened, the haven of metempsychosis.
The truth of this doctrine had struck him so forcibly that he embraced it at once even to its most extreme conclusions. Nothing in it was obscure to him, and in a few days, by means of meditation and calculations, he reached the point of being able to fix the exact date on which a man who died in such a year would reappear on earth. He knew approximately the time of all the transmigrations of a soul through the series of inferior beings, and according to the presumed total of good or evil accomplished in the last period of its life as a human being, he could tell the moment when this soul would enter into the body of a snake, a pig, a riding horse, an ox, a dog, an elephant or a monkey. The reappearances of a given soul in its superior form succeeded each other at regular intervals whatever might have been its previous sins. Thus the degree of punishment, always in proportion to the degree of culpability, consisted, not in the duration of exile under animal forms, but in the sojourn, more or less long, which the soul had to make within the body of an impure beast. The scale of beasts began in inferior degrees with the snake or the pig and ended with the monkey “which is Man deprived of speech,” said the Doctor: to which his worthy friend, the Warden, always replied that by the same process of reasoning Heraclius Gloss was nothing else but a monkey endowed with speech.