Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/325

 youth: they readily put faith in their hopes. Your first objection, 'the peeling off and crumbling of the bodily glazing, does not deprive the savages of the hope that they shall spring up again in a new flower-pot. But your second objection daily multiplies both itself and the number of sceptics; for as the second world itself cannot be subjected to the blast of the chymist's furnace, or placed in the focus of the solar microscope, the progress of chymical and physical science tends, by its dissolvents and other appliances, daily more and more to precipitate or sublime the hope of a future existence. Indeed, it is not by the practice of the body only, but by its very theory; not only by the applied mathematics of its lusts, but by the pure science of the existence of a world of sense, that the holy, inly-diving look upon the inner world is necessarily obscured and obstructed to beings dwelling as yet in the outer world. The inner world is more easily comprehended only by moralists, metaphysicians, poets, nay, even by artists; the chymist, the physician, the mathematician wants for it telescopes and ear-tubes, and in course of time even eyes and ears.

"On the whole, I find fewer men than is supposed, who decidedly either believe or deny a future existence. They that venture to deny it, are exceedingly few, because without it the present existence would lose all unity, character, completeness, and hope; and equally few are they who venture to assume it, because they are affrighted at the thought of their own translation into glory, and of the dying away of the diminished earth. Most men are tossed up and down midway between the two opinions, in poetic vagueness, by the impulse of alternating feelings.

"As we paint devils more easily than gods, furies more easily than the Venus Urania, hell more easily than heaven, so we believe in the former more easily than in the latter, in the greatest misery more easily than in the greatest happiness. Is it not, then, natural that our mind, accustomed to the disappointments and the chains of earth, should be slow to admit the thought of an Utopia against which the earth is wrecked, in order that its lilies may, like the Guernsey lilies, find a shore on which they may bloom, on which the tortured heart of man may be saved, satisfied, exalted, and blest."— Kampaner Thal, s. W., pp. 64, 55.

Thus far the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul are rather of a negative character, defensive against scepticism; in the sequel Jean Paul urges the positive proofs also of the existence of a future world with great effect. One passage is all we can make room for:—

"There is a spiritual world suspended in our heart which breaks like a warm sun through the clouds of the material world,—I mean the universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; those inner heavens and worlds