Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/324

Rh "When the extravasation of an artery in the fourth cerebral chamber of a Socrates covers the whole land of his ideas with a bloody inundation, it is true that all his ideas and moral affections are covered by the tide of blood; but they are not destroyed by it; because his virtue and his wisdom resided not in the cerebral globules which have been thus drowned, but in his 'I;' and because the dependence of the works of the clock on its case, for protection from dust and the like, does not prove that the case and the works are identical, still less that the clock consists of nothing but cases. Since the functions of the soul are not bodily functions, but only either their consequents or their antecedents; and since every function of the soul must leave traces in the soul, as well as in the body, why should we suppose that the former are lost, when paralysis of old age effaces the latter? Is there no difference, then, between the mind of a childish old man, and the mind of a child? If the soul of Socrates were to be plunged into the body of a Borgia, as into a mud-bath, would it therefore lose its moral powers, and all at once exchange its virtuous for vicious propensities? Or are we to suppose that in the morganatic marriage by which soul and body are united, but without community of goods, the one spouse can only gain, and does not lose also, with the other? Is the ingrafted spirit to feel the influence of the body only when it is flourishing, and not also when it is decaying? And if it must feel the latter, as well as the former, then must not the clay which is wrapped round the body give to the soul the appearance of stopping or of retrograding, in the same way as the progress of our earth gives a like appearance to the movements of the upper planets? If we were to be unshelled at all, this could not be effected but by the slow hand of time by the spoiling of old age; if it was once determined that our career shall not end in one world, the gulf which separates this world from the other could have no other form than the grave. The short interruption of our progress by old age, and the longer interruption of it by death, no more do away with that progress, than the still shorter interruption by sleep. In faintness of heart we mistake, like the first man, the total eclipse of sleep for the night of death, and that night itself for the world's doom."— Kampaner Thal, s. W., t. xix. pp. 48-50.

As for the second objection, the want of evidence of the reality of an invisible world, Jean Paul thus replies to it:—

"Am I to presume upon lifting the veil of a whole world of futurity? I, who am not coming thence, but am only on my way thither? No doubt it is this dissimilarity of the future world to the present, the very incommensurability of its greatness, that has made so many unbelievers in it. It is not the bursting of the larva-skin of our body in death, but the distance between our future spring and our present autumn, which throws so many doubts into our poor heart. This is evident in the case of the savages, who look upon the next life only as upon the second volume, the New Testament, of the first life, and know of no other difference between the two but that which exists between old age and