Richard Garnett, The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales, Londres, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1903.

« Karma », explained their interpreter, « its that congeries of circumstances which has necessitated the birth of each individual, and of whose good or evil he is the incarnation. Every act must needs be attended by consequences, and as these are usually of too-far-reaching a character to be exhausted in the life of the doer of the action, they cannot but engender another person by whom they are to be borne This truth is popularly expressed by the doctrine of transmigration, according to which individuals, as the character of their deeds may determine, are re-born as pigs or peacocks, beggars or princes. But this is a loose and unscientific way of speaking, for in fact it is not the individual that is re-born, but the character ; wich, even as the silkworm clothes itself with silk and the caddis-worm with mud and small shingle, creates for itself a new personnality, congruous with its own nature. We are therefore led to reflect what a prodigious multitude of sins some one must have committed ere the Roman world could be afflicted with such an Emperor as Elagabalus »

The Wisdom of the Indians