[The Monikins by J. Fenimore Cooper]@TWC D-Link book
The Monikins

CHAPTER XII
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We do not believe in transmigration in the individual at all, but in the transmigration of classes.

Thus, we hold that whenever a given generation of men, in a peculiar state of society, attain, in the aggregate, a certain degree of moral improvement, or mentality, as we term it in the schools, that there is an admixture of their qualities in masses, some believe by scores, others think by hundreds, and others again pretend by thousands; and if it is found, by the analysis that is regularly instituted by nature, that the proportions are just, the material is consigned to the monikin birth; if not, it is repudiated, and either kneaded anew for another human experiment, or consigned to the vast stores of dormant matter.

Thus all individuality, so far as it is connected with the past, is lost." "But, sir, existing facts contradict one of the most important of your propositions; while you admit that a want of a change in the seasons would be a consequence of the perpendicularity of the earth's axis to the plane of its present orbit, this change in the seasons is a matter not to be denied.

Flesh and blood testify against you here, no less than reason." "I spoke of things as they were, sir, previously to the birth of the monikinia; since which time a great, salutary, harmonious, and contemplated alteration has occurred.

Nature had reserved the polar region for the new species, with divers obvious and benevolent purposes.
They were rendered uninhabitable by the obliquity of the sun's rays; and though matter, in the shape of mastodons and whales, with an instinct of its antagonistic destination, had frequently invaded their precincts, it was only to leave the remains of the first embedded in fields of ice, memorials of the uselessness of struggling against destiny, and to furnish proofs of the same great truth in the instance of the others; who, if they did enter the polar basins as masters of the great deep, either left their bones there, or returned in the same characters as they went.


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