Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner Man.

We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.

Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).

Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.

I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."

"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."

He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;^[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly cool, and at last together die!

He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the revived little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse outward one.

I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and reproducing power, as, according to ReaumÜr, long animals more easily re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.

O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty,^[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous world.

It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,^[18] you therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall, anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every picture, every thought,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe, and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one; how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology, should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs but to will (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds again without help from the body."

Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself." "There must always be some perpetuum mobile," I said, "for all things have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject. If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and wise, but his self was, and because the dependence of a watch on its case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions are not bodily ones, but only precede or follow them; and as every spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between the soul of a childish old man, and that of a child? Must the soul of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains, not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The short interruption to our progress by age, and the longer one by death, destroy this progress as little as the shortest interruption by sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the total sun-eclipse of sleep to be the night of death, and this again the doomsday of the world."

"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.

New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.

(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)