The last book of Manu is on transmigration and final beatitude.  The principle is here laid down that every human action, word, and thought bears its appropriate fruit, good or evil.  Out of the heart proceed three sins of thought, four sins of the tongue, and three of the body, namely, covetous, disobedient, and atheistic thoughts; scurrilous, false, frivolous, and unkind words; and actions of theft, bodily injury, and licentiousness.  He who controls his thoughts, words, and actions is called a triple commander.  There are three qualities of the soul, giving it a tendency to goodness, to passion, and to darkness.  The first leads to knowledge, the second to desire, the third to sensuality.  To the first belong study of Scripture, devotion, purity, self-command, and obedience.  From the second proceed hypocritical actions, anxiety, disobedience, and self-indulgence.  The third produces avarice, atheism, indolence, and every act which a man is ashamed of doing.  The object of the first quality is virtue; of the second, worldly success; of the third, pleasure.  The souls in which the first quality is supreme rise after death to the condition of deities; those in whom the second rules pass into the bodies of other men; while those under the dominion of the third become beasts and vegetables.  Manu proceeds to expound, in great detail, this law of transmigration.  For great sins one is condemned to pass a great many times into the bodies of dogs, insects, spiders, snakes, or grasses.  The change has relation to the crime:  thus, he who steals grain shall be born a rat; he who steals meat, a vulture; those who indulge in forbidden pleasures of the senses shall have their senses made acute to endure intense pain.

The highest of all virtues is disinterested goodness, performed from the love of God, and based on the knowledge of the Veda.  A religious action, performed from hope of reward in this world or the next, will give one a place in the lowest heaven.  But he who performs good actions without hope of reward, “perceiving the supreme soul in all beings, and all beings in the supreme soul, fixing his mind on God, approaches the divine nature.”

   “Let every Brahman, with fixed attention, consider all nature as
   existing in the Divine Spirit; all worlds as seated in him; he alone as
   the whole assemblage of gods; and he the author of all human actions.”

“Let him consider the supreme omnipresent intelligence as the sovereign lord of the universe, by whom alone it exists, an incomprehensible spirit; pervading all beings in five elemental forms, and causing them to pass through birth, growth, and decay, and so to revolve like the wheels of a car.”

“Thus the man who perceives in his own soul the supreme soul present in all creatures, acquires equanimity toward them all, and shall be absolved at last in the highest essence, even that of the Almighty himself.”

We have given these copious extracts from the Brahmanic law, because this code is so ancient and authentic, and contains the bright consummate flower of the system, before decay began to come.