"Oh Harleigh! how fatally is that true! how little did I foresee, when I so delighted in your society, that that very delight would but impel me to burn for the moment of bidding you an eternal farewell!"
Harleigh sighed; but with earnestness continued: "We conceive the soul to influence, if not to direct our whole construction, yet we have no sensible proof of its being in any part of it: how, then, shall we determine that to be destroyed or departed, which we have never known to be created? never seen to exist? O bow we down! for all is inexplicable!
We can but say, the body is obvious in its perfection, and still obvious in its decay; the soul is always unsearchable! were we sure it were only our understanding, we might, perhaps, develop it; or only our feelings, we might catch it; but it is something indefinable, of which the consciousness tells us not the qualities, nor the possession the attributes; and of which the end leaves no trace! We follow it not to its dissolution like the body; which, after what we call death, is still as evident, as when our conception of what is soul were yet lent to it: if the soul, then, be equally material, say, is it still there also?
though as unseen and hidden as when breath and motion were yet perceptible?"
"Body and soul, Albert, come together with existence, and together are nullified by death."
"And are you, Elinor, aware whither such reasoning may lead? If the body instead of being the tenement of the soul, is but one and the same with it;--how are you certain, if they are not sundered by death, that they do not in death, though by means, and with effects to us unknown, still exist together? That with the body, whether animated or inert, the soul may not always be adherent? who shall a.s.sure you, who, at least, shall demonstrate, that if the soul be but a part of the body, it may not think, though no utterance can be given to its thoughts; and may not feel, though all expression is at an end, and motion is no more? Whither may such reasoning lead? to what strange suggestions may it not conduct us? to what vain fantasies, what useless horrours? May we not apprehend that the insects, the worms which are formed from the human frame, may partake of and retain human consciousness? May we not imagine those wretched reptiles, which creep from our remains, to be sensible of their fallen state, and tortured by their degradation? to resent, as well as seek to elude the ill usage, the blows, the oppressions to which they are exposed?--"
"Fie! Albert, fie!"
"Nay, what proof, if for proof you wait, have you to the contrary? Is it their writhing? their sensitive shrink from your touch? their agonizing efforts to save their miserable existence from your gripe?"
"Harleigh! Harleigh!"
"And this dust, Elinor, to which you settle that, finally, all will be mouldered or crumbled;--fear you not that its every particle may possess some sensitive quality? When we cease to speak, to move, to breathe, you a.s.sert the soul to be annihilated: But why? Is it only because you lose sight of its operations? In chemistry are there not sundry substances which, by certain processes, become invisible, and are sought in vain by the spectator; but which, by other processes, are again brought to view? And shall the chemist have this faculty to produce, and to withdraw, from our sight, and the Creator of All be denied any occult powers?"
"Nay, Albert, "how can we reason but from what we know?"--Will you compare a fact which experiment can prove, which reason may discuss, and which the senses may witness, with a bare possibility? A vague conjecture?"
"Is nothing, then, credible, Elinor, that is out of the province of demonstration? nothing probable, that surpa.s.ses our understanding?--nothing sacred that is beyond our view? Are we so perfect in our knowledge, even of what we behold, or possess, as to draw such presumptuous conclusions, of the self-sufficiency and omnipotence of our faculties, for judging what is every way out of our sight, or reach? Do we know one radical point of our existence, here, where "we live, and move, and have our being?" Do we comprehend, unequivocally, our immediate attributes and powers? Can we tell even how our hands obey our will? how our desires suffice to guide our feet from place to place?
to roll our eyes from object to object? If all were clear, save the existence and the extinction of the soul, then, indeed, we might p.r.o.nounce all faith, but in self-evidence, to be folly!"
"Faith! Harleigh, faith? the very word scents of monkish subtleties!
"Tis to faith, to that absurd idea of lulling to sleep our reason, of setting aside our senses, our observation, our knowledge; and giving our ignorant, unmeaning trust, and blind confidence to religious quacks; "tis to that, precisely that, you owe what you term our infidelity; for "tis that which has provoked the spirit of investigation, which has shewn us the pusillanimity and imbecility of consigning the short period in which we possess our poor fleeting existence, to other men"s uses, deliberations, schemes, fancies, and ordinances. For what else can you call submission to unproved a.s.sertions, and concurrence in unfounded belief?"
"And yet, this faith, Elinor, which, in religion, you renounce, despise, or defy, because in religion you would think, feel, and believe by demonstration alone, you insensibly admit in nearly all things else!
Have you it not in morals? Does society exist but by faith? Does friendship,--I will not name what is so open to controversy as love,--but say! has friendship any other tie? has honour any other bond than faith? We have no proofs, no demonstrations of worth that can reach the regions of the heart: we judge but by effects; we believe but by a.n.a.logies; we love, we esteem, we trust but by credulity, by faith! For where is the mathematician who can calculate what may be p.r.o.nounced of the mind, from what is seen in the countenance, or uttered by speech?
yet is any one therefore so wretched, as not to feel any social reliance beyond what he can mathematically demonstrate to be merited?"
"And to what but that, Albert, precisely that, do we owe being so perpetually duped and betrayed? to what but building upon false trust?
upon appearance, and not certainty?"
"Certainty, Elinor! Where, and in what is certainty to be found? If you disclaim belief in immortality upon faith, as insufficient to satisfy reason, what is the basis even of your disbelief? Is it not faith also?
When you demand the proofs of immortality, let me demand, in return, what are your proofs of materialism? And, till you can bring to demonstration the operations of the soul while we live, presume not to decide upon its extinction when we die! Of the corporeal machine, on the contrary, speak at pleasure; you have before you all your doc.u.ments for ratiocination and decision; but, life once over,--when you have placed the limbs, closed the eyes, arranged the form,--can you arrange the mind?--the soul?"
"Excite no doubts in me, Harleigh!--my creed is fixed."
"When sleep overtakes us," he continued, "and all, to the beholder, looks the picture of death, save that the breath still heaves the bosom;--what is it that guards entire, uninjured, the mind? the faculties? It is not our consciousness,--we have none! Where is the soul in that period? Gone it is not, for we are sensible to all that had preceded its suspension, the moment that we awake. Yet, in that state of periodical insensibility, what, but experience, could make those who view us believe that we could ever rise, speak, move, or think again?
How inert is the body! How helpless, how useless, how incapable? Do we see who is near us? Do we hear who addresses us? Do we know when the most frightful crimes are committed by our sides? What, I demand, is our consciousness? We have not the most distant of any thing that pa.s.ses around us: yet we open our eyes--and all is known, all is familiar again. We hear, we see, we feel, we understand!"
"Yes; but in that sleep, Harleigh, that mere mechanical repose of the animal, we still breathe; we are capable, therefore, of being restored to all our sensibilities, by a single touch, by a single start; "tis but a separation that parts us from ourselves, as absence parts us from our friends. We yet live,--we yet, therefore, may meet again."
"And why, when we live no longer, may we not also, Elinor, meet again?"
"Why?--Do you ask why?--Look round the old church-yards! See you not there the dispersion of our poor mouldered beings? Is not every bone the prey,--or the disgust,--of every animal? How, when scattered, commixed, broken, battered, how shall they ever again be collected, united, arranged, covered and coloured so as to appear regenerated?"
"But what, Elinor, is the fragility, or the dispersion of the body, to the solidity and the durability of the soul? Why are we to decide, that to see ourselves again, and again to view each other, such as we seem here, substance, or what we understand by it, is essential to our re-union hereafter? Do we not meet, act, talk, move, think with one another in our dreams? What is it which, then, embodies our ideas? which gives to our sight, in perfect form and likeness, those with whom we converse? which makes us conceive that we move, act, speak, and look, ourselves, with the same gesture, mien, and voice as when awake?"
"Dreams? pho!--they are but the nocturnal vagaries of the imagination."
"And what, Elinor, is imagination? You will not call it a part of your body?"
"No; but the blood which still circulates in our veins, Harleigh, gives imagination its power."
"But does the blood circulate in the veins of our parents, of our friends? of our acquaintances? and of strangers whom we equally meet?
yet we see them all; we converse with them all; we utter opinions; we listen to their answers. And how ably we sometimes argue! how characteristically those with whom we dispute reply! yet we do not imagine we guide them. We wait their opinions and decisions, in the same uncertainty and suspense, that we await them in our waking intercourse.
We have the same fears of ill fortune; the same horrour of ill usage; the same ardour for success; the same feelings of sorrow, of joy, of hope, or of remorse, that animate or that torture us, in our daily occurrences. What new countries we visit! what strange sights we see!
what delight, what anguish, what alarms, what pleasures, and what pains we experience! Yet in all this variety of incident, conversation, motion, feeling,--we seem, to those who look at us, but unintelligent and senseless, though still breathing clay."
"Ay; but after all those scenes, we awake, Albert, we awake! But when do we awake from death? Death, the same experience tells us, is sleep eternal!"
"But in that sleep, also, are there no dreams? Are you sure of that? If, in our common sleep, there still subsists an active principle, that feels, speaks, invents, and only by awaking finds that the mind alone, and not the body has been working;--how are you so sure that no such active principle subsists in that sleep which you call eternal? Who has told you what pa.s.ses where experience is at an end? Who has talked to you of "that bourne whence no traveller returns?" With the cessation, indeed, of warmth; with the stillness of those pulses which beat from circulating blood, all seems to end; but seems it not also to end when we fall into apoplexies? when we faint away? when we appear to be drowned? or when, by any means, life is casually suspended? Yet when those arts, that skill, of which even the success teaches not the principle, even the process discovers not the secret resources, draw back, by means intelligible and visible, but through causes indefinable, the fleeting breath to its corporeal habitation; animation instantly returns, and the soul, with all its powers, revives!"
"Ay, there, there, Albert, is the very point! If the soul were distinct from the body, why should not those who are recovered from drowning, suffocation, or other apparent death, be able to give some account of what pa.s.sed in those periods when they seemed to be no more? And who has done it? No one, Harleigh! not a single renovated being, has explained away the doubts to which those suspensions of animation give rise."
"And has any one explained, Elinor, why, though sometimes we have such wonders to relate of the scenes in which we have borne a part in our dreams,--we open our eyes, at other times, with no consciousness whatever, that we have, any way existed from the moment of closing them?
The wants of refreshment and recruit of our corporeal machine, we all feel, and know; those of that part which is intellectual,--who is able to calculate? What, except the powers, can be more distinct than the exercises of the mind and of the body? Yet, though we see not the workings of what is intellectual; though they are known only by their effects,--does the student by the midnight oil require less rest from his mental fatigues,--whether he take it or not,--than the ploughman from his corporal labour? Is he not as wearied, as exhausted, after a day consigned to serious and unremitting study and reflection, as the labourer who has spent it in digging, paving, hewing, and sawing? Yet his body has been perfectly at peace; has not moved, has not made the smallest exertion."
"And why, Harleigh? What is that, but because--"
"Hasten not, Elinor, thence, to your favourite conclusion, that soul and body, if wearied or rested together, are, therefore, one and the same thing: observation, and reflection, turned to other points of view, will shew you fresh reasons, and objects, every day, to disprove that ident.i.ty: shew you, on one side, corporal force for supporting the bitterest grief of heart, with uninjured health; and, mental force, on the other side, for bearing the acutest bodily disorders with unimpaired intellectual vigour. How often do the most fragile machines, enwrap the stoutest minds? how often do the halest frames, encircle the feeblest intellects? All proves that the connexion between mind and body, however intimate, is not blended;--though where its limits begin, or where they end,--who can tell? But, who, also I repeat, can explain the phenomenon, by which, in the dead of the night, when we are completely insulated, and left in utter darkness, we firmly believe, nay, feel ourselves shone upon by the broad beams of day; and surrounded by society, with which we act, think, and reciprocate ideas?"
"Dreams, I must own, Albert, are strangely incomprehensible. How bodies can seem to appear, and voices to be heard, where all around is empty s.p.a.ce, it is not easy to conceive!"
"Let this insolvable, and acknowledged difficulty, then, Elinor, in a circ.u.mstance which, though daily recurring, remains inexplicable, check any hardy decision of the cause why, after certain suspensions, the soul may resume its functions to our evident knowledge; yet why we can neither ascertain its departure, its continuance, nor its return, after others. Oh Elinor! mock not, but revere the impenetrable mystery of eternity! Ignorance is here our lot; presumption is our most useless infirmity. The mind and body after death must either be separate, or together. If together, as you a.s.sert, there is no proof attainable, that the soul partakes not of all the changes, all the dispersions, all the sufferings, and all the poor enjoyments, of what to us seems the lifeless, but which, in that case, is only the speechless carcase: if separate, as I believe,--whither goest thou, Oh soul! to what regions of bliss?--or what abysses of woe?"
"Harleigh, you electrify me! you convulse the whole train of my principles, my systems, my long cherished conviction!"
"Say, rather, Elinor, of your faith!--your faith in infidelity! Oh Elinor! why call you not, rather, upon faith to aid your belief? Faith, and revealed religion! The limited state of our positive perceptions, grants us no means for comparison, for judgment, or even for thought, but by a.n.a.logy: ask yourself, then, Elinor,--What is there, even in immortality, more difficult of comprehension, than that indescribable daily occurrence, which all mankind equally, though unreflecting experience, of a total suspension of every species of living knowledge, of every faculty, of every sense,--called sleep? A suspension as big with matter for speculation and wonder, though its cessation is visible to us, as that last sleep, of which we view not the period."
"Albert!--should you shake my creed,--shall I be better contented? or but yet more wretched?"
"Can Elinor think,--yet ask such a question? Can a prospect of a future state fail to offer a possibility of future happiness? Why wilfully reject a consolation that you have no means to disprove? What know you of this soul which you settle to be so easily annihilated? By what criterion do you judge it? You have none! save a general consciousness, that a something there is within us that mocks all search, yet that always is uppermost; that antic.i.p.ates good or evil; that outruns all events; that feels the blow ere the flesh is touched; that expects the sound before the ear receives it; that, unseen, untraced, unknown, pervades, rules, animates all! that harbours thoughts, feelings, designs which no human force can controul; which no mortal, unaided by our own will, can discover; and which no aid whatever, either of our own or of others, can bring forward to any possible manifestation!"
"Alas, Harleigh! You shew me nonent.i.ty itself to be as doubtful as immortality! Of what wretched stuff are we composed! Which way must I now turn,--
"Lost and bewildered in my fruitless search,"[13]--
which way must I turn to develop truth? to comprehend my own existence!
Oh Albert!--you almost make me wish to rest my perturbed mind where fools alone, I thought, found rest, or hypocrites have seemed to find it,--on Religion!"
[Footnote 13: Addison.]
"The feeling mind, dear Elinor, has no other serious serenity; no other hold from the black, cheerless, petrifying expectation of nullity. If, then, even a wish of light break through your dark despondence, read, study the Evangelists!--and truth will blaze upon you, with the means to find consolation."
"Albert, I know now where I am!--You open to me possibilities that overwhelm me! My head seems bursting with fulness of struggling ideas!"
"Give them, Elinor, fair play, and they will soon, in return, give you tranquillity. Reflect only,--that that quality, that faculty, be its nature, its durability, and its purpose what they may, which the world at large agrees to call soul, has its universal comprehension from a something that is felt; not that is proved! Yet who, and where is the Atheist, the Deist, the Infidel of any description, gifted with the means to demonstrate, that, in quitting the body with the parting breath, it is necessarily extinct? that it may not, on the contrary, still BE, when speech and motion are no more? when our flesh is mingled with the dust, and our bones are dispersed by the winds? and BE, as while we yet exist, no part of our body, no single of our senses; never, while we seem to live, visible, yet never, when we seem to die, perishable? May it not, when, with its last sigh, it leaves the body, mingle with that vast expanse of air, which no instrument can completely a.n.a.lyse, and which our imperfect sight views but as empty s.p.a.ce? May it not mount to upper regions, and enjoy purified bliss? May not all air be peopled with our departed friends, hovering around us, as sensible as we are unconscious? May not the unc.u.mbered soul watch over those it loves?