He would wish to have known what it was to possess rank or wealth or beauty, or to live in a different race or climate, or to see more of the world and society. No spiritual ascent could progress while earthly longings were dragging back the soul, and so it frees itself from them by successively securing and dropping them. When the round of such knowledge has been traversed, regret for ignorance has died out. True awards must be given largely on the plane whereon they have been incurred, else their nature is changed, their effects are impaired, and their collateral bearings lost. Physical outrage has to be checked by the infliction of physical pain, and not merely by the arousing of internal regret.
Honest lives find appropriate consequence in visible honor.
But one career is too short for the precise balancing of accounts, and many are needed that every good or evil done in each may be requited on the earth where it took place. Considered as training or as penal infliction for wrong done, a repeated return to earth is needful for fulness of discipline. Reincarnations ensure a continuous advance in the successive races of men . But if such child is the flower of many incarnations, he expresses an achieved past as well as a possible future. The tide of life thus rises to greater heights, each wave mounting higher upon the shore.