Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/323

306 ; with this only difference, that, instead of Roman knights and senators in all the dignity of the toga, we have here ladies and gentlemen of bon ton, dressed up in Jean Paul's best manner, especially the ladies. The "Kampaner Thal" belongs to his earlier productions, its publication intervening between "Siebenkäs" and "Titan;" its tendency, and the character of the author's views on this subject, will be best understood by the replies which he makes to the two principal objections raised against the belief in the immortality of the soul: the first, the apparently simultaneous decay of the powers of the soul, as well as the body, in old age; the second, the alleged impossibility of searching into a future mode of existence, of peeping over, out of a visible, into an invisible world. In answer to the first of these objections, he thus argues:—

"You are not a materialist; you assume that the action of the soul and that of the body correspond and excite each other; that, in fact, bodily organs are the keys which answer to the different glasses of the inner harmonica. Hitherto the bodily accords of the feelings only have been noted, as, for instance, the swelling heart and the sluggish pulse in longing desire, the effusion of bile in anger, and so forth. But the intertwining and anastomosis between the inner and the outer man is of so quick and so intimate a nature, that every image and idea of the mind must call forth a corresponding vibration of some nerve. These bodily after-tones ought to be observed and set down in the notation of speech when they express poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, or anatomical ideas, no less than when they are the utterance of the feelings and passions. At the same time the body is no more than the sounding-board; it is not the spiritual scale, nor its harmony. Sadness bears no resemblance to tears, confusion none to the blood which is ebbing in the cheeks, wit none to champagne, the idea of this valley none to the miniature sketch of it on our retina. The inner man, the veiled god in the statue, is not of stone like the statue itself; his living members grow and ripen by a mysterious process of life within the stony limbs of the outer man. We do not sufficiently take notice of the influence which, in fact, the inner man has upon the outer man in restraining and moulding him; bow, for instance, principles gradually cool and quench the irascible body, which, according to physiological laws, ought to be burning more and more fiercely from week to week; how it has even happened that terror or anger has held together, as by spiritual clasps, the texture of the body, which was already rending asunder and out of joint. Even when the whole brain is in a manner paralyzed; when every fibre is already rusted in and choked up; when the mind is clogged, it needs only an act of the will, which may at any moment be exerted,—it needs only some letter, some striking idea, to set the machinery of the cerebral fibres, the spiritual clockwork, going again without any bodily assistance….