6. Theosophy and Contemporary Intellectual Life

This idea of repeated lives on earth (reincarnation) must necessarily appear to most of our contemporaries as paradoxical, even grotesque. But it will be the same with it as with the idea of Francesco Redi, who, a few centuries ago, first proposed the idea, against the resistance of his contemporaries, that a germ of life cannot arise from the combination of inanimate substances, but only as the descendant of a similar living being. What seemed to be a fantastic idea of Francesco Redi's to people only a few centuries ago is now a generally accepted truth.