Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/183

178 reason of his discovery that Nihilism and immortality alike are reachable through the continued exercise of the human will.]

The discovery alluded to in the bracketed sentence is this: There are two kinds of immortality: 1st. A man may survive death, and escape the thrall of his physical form, and maintain his ethereal state for a while; yet if he shall not have received the proper and essential love-impulsion before birth, or else have subsequently developed love, he is as certainly doomed to, fade, dwindle, go back to the monadal state, as that gravitation is a law. He will be like the huge soap-bubble at the end of a pipe-bowl, which only requires to be let alone in order to grow smaller by degrees until it is again all within the rim of the bowl, and then bursts forever beyond the possibility of reparation.

Since the advent of the modern phase of Spiritualism, there have been thousands of people who have sought to commune with their deceased acquaintances, but wholly unavailingly. Why? Simply because their friends thus sought have ceased to exist. 2d. A man may have received the proper impulsion before birth, or have gained it afterwards, and he may enter the ethereal lands with, to use a common but very expressive phase—such a good send-off as to be able to continue on forever. The two kinds of immortality may be likened unto this: one is as a seed planted in good rich soil, but only an inch or two deep, with a hard pan of solid, arid rock beneath it, which defies the roots to spread; wherefore, that plant looks well and promises much for a while, but it soon withers and is seen no more forever. The other seed, planted in the same soil with plenty of water and root-room, grows gayly, waxes strong, spreads, blooms, flourishes, triumphs, and perpetuates itself; yet the seeds were alike, and so was the soil.

There are, also, two kinds of Nihilism: 1st. That of the brute and the brute homos, or brutal-man—both of whom are doomed to sudden and total extinction—a cessation of being as complete as that of exploded powder, or extinguished light, which, as powder or light, can exist no more forever; and, 2d. A truly human nihility, rest, divine Narwana,—a state infinitely harder to reach than any phase of active immortality, whether transient or