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JANUARY, 1975
Not only did Wordsworth believe that plants and animals have life; but he also shared the Jaina belief that they have a soul as much as man has :
"A motion and a spirit, that impels,
All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things."3
Wordsworth also believed in the transmigration of the soul. The soul never dies-it enters into different forms, sometimes in the body of an animal and at other times in the body of man :
"Our birth is but a sleep and a foregetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar."4
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Shelley also shared Wordsworth's belief in the transmigration of the soul :
"I change, but I cannot die."5
These poets also rightly understood the purpose of transmigration. The soul has to be born and born again in this world, till all Karmic bondage is shed off and it stands pure in resplendent glory to be one with God. The march of the soul from lower forms of life to higher is but a process of evolution. The soul in a frog or toad has no chance of final redemption or salvation; it has to rise up to the human form. Man is the highest stage in the evolution of the soul and from it the next step is Godhood. But that does not mean that once the soul has entered the human-form, there is no climbing-down. It is a constant game of "Snake-and-Ladder". We enter into inferior or superior forms of being according to our actions in the past life. Good actions in one life are rewarded by better birth in the next life and vice versa. Even among human beings, the differences between the rich and the poor, the diseased and the healthy, the lucky and the unfortunate is the immediate result of our past actions. So once the soul has entered the humanform, the summum bonum of existence, our constant effort should be to avoid any possibility of any "climbing-down". Our righteous conduct
3 Tintern Abbey.
4 Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.
5 The Cloud.
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