THE RIVER LETHE 563
only a prison, a shell, how is it that the soul, as soon as it has quitted its abode, loses all remembrance of what has
befallen it? Pythagoras, it is true, used to relate to his disciples what he had successively been since the siege of
Troy l. But the merest caviller among them might have
'
offered the following objection: Since you so well remember what you have been before your present actual
' existence, why do I not remember in the same manner \
Pythagoras would no doubt have answered just as the
Hindus answer, namely, that the gift of remembrance is granted only to certain privileged souls, and that they
obtain it by reciting certain appropriate mantrams. Unfortunately, these mantrams are not unlike the waters of the Fountain of Youth, of which every one boasts to be the owner, but the whereabouts of which nobody knows. Plato, who was too enlightened not to recognize this weak side of the system, invented the river Lethe. The souls were obliged to drink its waters before returning to the world, and thereby entirely forgot the past. The invention of this fiction required neither ingenuity nor wit. The Hindus cut the knot more freely. They say that the act of regeneration suffices to make one forget all that has been seen or done before. A child under two or three years of age does not remember one day what he did the day before; still more therefore will he forget what he was and what he
did before his new birth.
This explanation is at least more simple than that of Plato, if it is not equally ingenious.
Naraka, or Hell.
Through the tissue of vain fancies which the Hindus have woven over their system of metempsychosis, ostensibly to explain it but in practice to obscure it, we may catch a few faint gleams of the true religion, the principles of which were inculcated by the patriarchs of old. Apart from the rewards and punishments which they regard as the due retribution in this world of the good or evil which a man has done in a preceding generation, it is certain
that they acknowledge a future life, and a Supreme Being,
1
See Ovid ' s Metam. xv. 3.