Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/58

 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; 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 Reaumur, 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.