When Reid says that there are certain characteristics - and these just of the kind whose development truly ennobles human life - which the soul brings with it into the world, a picture of man is evoked in us in which the supersensible part of his being appears as an entity whose existence reaches further back than the moment of birth and even the first beginnings of the body. Now such a conception of man is in no way foreign to humanity, in more ancient times it was universally prevalent, and it still lives on to-day, if merely traditionally, in the eastern part of the world. It is only in the West that from a certain period it ceased to be held. This was the result of a change which entered into human memory in historical times, just as the re-dawning of the old knowledge of man's pre-existence, of which Reid is a symptom, is a result of another corresponding alteration in the memory-powers of man in modern times.