Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/330

Rh in the great Sahara beneath the earth, because it ceases to be at all. It cannot even mourn and weep; for the shade in which it might sorrow, which for a moment stood there warm and coloured, has not grown cold and dark, but has become invisible in the vast invisible night. Even that small warm and red thing, which thou called thy loving heart, is dissolved, it may be, at the very moment when it weeps, into invisible intangible night, not into a part of that night (which has no parts), but into that night itself."- Selina, s. W., t. lxi. pp. 15-18.

From this powerful refutation of the theory of individual annihilation, Jean Paul passes on to an examination of the system of metempsychosis; he next proceeds to consider the objections against the immortality of the soul founded on the phenomena of sleep, of dreams, of old age; which leads him to throw out many striking remarks on the relation between body and soul. Thence he proceeds to the positive demonstration of the soul's immortality; on two grounds, first, the existence of God; secondly, the soul's inward craving for happiness, and the internal promise of it to the heart, which argues the existence of a future state, in which that craving may be stilled and that promise fulfilled.

The abstract question of the soul's immortality being thus decided in the affirmative, Jean Paul passes on to the further questions of the resurrection of the body, and mutual recognition in a future state. But on this deep and interesting theme he was not permitted to do more than put the objections into the mouth of the "Advocatus Diaboli." In the answer to them he was overtaken by the hand of death; his work remained unfinished on the earth, and his truth-thirsting soul was removed out of this world, which was to him a state of darkness and conjecture, into that world in which all the questions of life are answered, and all its riddles solved; that world to the existence of which, and its connexion with the present; Jean Paul himself bore testimony when he said, that "somewhere there must be resting on the earth a heavenly ladder, whose top reaches up far beyond the most distant stars."