(M221) So far as we can gather the real opinions of Pythagoras and Empedocles from the traditional history of the one and the miserably mutilated writings of the other, they seem both, like Buddha, with whom they had much in common, to have used the old savage doctrine of the transmigration of souls mainly as a handle by which to impress on the minds of their followers the necessity of leading an innocent, pure, and even ascetic life in this world as the only means of ensuring a blissful or at all events an untroubled eternity in a world to come.(908) At least this is fairly certain for Empedocles, whose views are comparatively well known to us through the fragments of his philosophical writings. From these utterances of his, the genuineness of which seems to be beyond suspicion, we gather that the psychology of Empedocles was a curious blend of savagery and mysticism. He regarded the incarnation of the human soul in a body of any sort as a punishment for sin, a degradation, a fall from heaven, an exile from God, a banishment from a world of bliss to a world of woe.(909) He describes the earth as a cavern,(910) a joyless land, where men wander in darkness, a prey to murder and revenge, to swarms of foul fiends, to wasting sickness and decay.(911) He speaks with pity and contempt of the life of mortals as a wretched and miserable existence, begotten of strife and sighs and prolonged as a punishment for their sins through a series of transmigrations, until, by the exercise of virtue, they have been born again as prophets, poets, physicians, and princes, and so return at last to communion with the gods to live thenceforth free from pain and sorrow, immortal, incorruptible, divine.(912) This view of human destiny, this passionate scorn poured on the present world, this ecstatic aspiration after a blissful eternity, the reward of virtue in a world to come, are very alien from the cheerful serenity, the calm rationalism of the ordinary Greek attitude towards existence on earth.(913) In his profound conviction of the manifold sufferings inseparable from mortality, in his longing to put off the burden of the body or what he calls "the garment of flesh,"(914) in his tenderness for the lower animals and his strong sense of kinship with them, Empedocles resembled Buddha, whose whole cast of thought, however, was tinged with a still deeper shade of melancholy, a more hopeless outlook on the future. Yet so close in some respects is the similarity between the two that we might incline to suppose a direct influence of Buddhism on Empedocles, were it not that the dates of the two great thinkers, so far as they can be ascertained, appear to exclude the supposition.(915)