Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/179

174 that at death this Æreal form escapes the body, and goes to spend its eternal years in heaven or in hell; that it can die no more, but lives, loves, suffers, thinks, enjoys, in that other life; and that it is in all respects a human being still. This brief definition is as good as one occupying a hundred pages.

Now if man is—and the affirmative proofs are strong—the descendant of any sort of ape, existent now or extinct for a hundred millenia; if he is immortal and the ape-parents not so, it is clear that those advanced specimens of the Simiadæ from whom sprung the first immortal human beings must have conferred on their offspring a power and quality themselves had not; so that at death the progenitors returned to dust, while the progeny exulted in perpetual life, and renewed existence; immigrated to other worlds in the Vault, immortalized beings, but with no parents to meet and greet them on the farther shore—the lands beyond the swelling flood, the kingdoms o'er the Sea!—and, undoubtedly, such was actually the case. Of course these first fruits were not of the high and fine grades subsequently developed on the earth by dint of time and better physical conditions. Logic is a good sieve, even if a grain or two of error does occasionally fall through the meshes among the finer truths. Now either the parent-apes were capable of conferring what they had not themselves—which is equivalent to extracting the greater from the less—an absurdity on its very face—or man is not immortal by right or dint or reason of birth, and must, therefore, reach that condition, or attain that quality in some other way, by some other method, through some other rule or Law; that is, children must have the quality conferred upon them at the very instant of generation; must acquire it during the gestative period; at some other point or moment of their career, or, finally, gain it in some mysterious or miraculous manner not generally known or fairly understood. But it is sheerly preposterous to believe, and impossible in every way, that an immortal thing could, or can, derive its death-defying nature from that which is itself death's common prey and victim. To take a gallon from a river is easy; but a river from a gallon is impossible, yet not more so than to predicate the immortality of the offspring of apes as a derivative