Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/128

 110 foolishness is too great for me to dare to quote even one of them.

From these data, if it be considered worth while, one may now form a conception of that most extravagant and queerest of fancies in which all his dreams culminate. Just as various powers and capacities form that unity which constitutes the soul or the inner man, in the same way also various spirits (whose principal traits have the same relation to each other as the many faculties of a single spirit have among themselves) form a society which has the appearance of a great man. :. In this image each spirit finds himself in that place and in that apparent member which is in accordance with his peculiar office in such a spiritual body. Again, all societies of spirits together, and the world of all these invisible beings, finally presents itself in the appearance of the Grand Man, Maximus Homo.. A colossal and gigantic fancy, which, perhaps, has grown out of an old childish conception, just as in schools sometimes, as an aid to memory, a whole continent is pictured to the pupils under the image of a sitting virgin, &c. In this enormous man there is a universal, most intimate communion of one spirit with all others, and of all with one; and, whatever may be the positions or changes of living beings in regard to each other in this world, still each has his place in the Grand Man entirely distinct from his place here, a place which he never changes, which is in immeasurable space only according to appearance, but in reality signifies only a particular character of his relations and influences.