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which, concentrated in his own nature, is | rested on the numbers without number of inthence diffused throughout the universe, al- telligent and sentient creatures who shared though in degrees immeasurably distant from with me my new abode. Incorruptible, exempt each other, and according to laws unsearch- from lassitude, and undesirous of repose, they able by any finite understanding. Thus im- imbibed energy from rays which in the twinkbibing knowledge of myself and of Deity, and ling of an eye would have dissipated into thin alive only to the emotions inspired by this vapour the world and all that it inherits. On ever-present spectacle, I became the passive that opaque globe, the principles which sustain, recipient of influences instinct with a delight and those which destroy life had been engaged so tranquil, and with a peace so unbroken, within me in a constant but unequal conflict. that weariness, satiety, and the desire for The quickening spirit on earth, though contichange appeared to have departed from me nually recruited by rest and sleep, had at for ever. length yielded to the still-recurring assaults of her more potent adversaries. Here the vital powers had no foes to encounter, and demanded no respite from their ceaseless occupation. In the world below, from man, the universal sovereign, to the animalcula who people a drop of turbid water, I had seen all animated things sustaining themselves by the mutual extermination of each other. In the solar sphere I found all pursuing their appointed course of duty or enjoyment, in immortal youth and undecaying vigour. Death had found no entrance, life demanded no renewal.

Change, however, awaited me. So slight and imperfect had been the alliance between my disembodied spirit and the world of matter, that, destitute of all sensation, I had lost all measure of time, and knew not whether ages had revolved, or but a moment had passed away during my isolated state of being. Heir to ten thousand infirmities, the body I had tenanted on earth had returned to the dust, there to be dissolved and recompounded into other forms and new substances. Yet the seminal principle of that mortal frame had adhered to me; and at the appointed season there brooded over it from on high a reproductive and plastic influence. Fearfully and wonderfully as I had been made when a denizen of the world, the chemical affinities, and the complex organization of my animal structure, had borne the impress of decay, of a transitory state, and of powers restricted in their free exercise. Passing all comprehension as had been the wisdom with which it was adapted to the purposes of my sublunary being, those purposes had been ephemeral, and circumscribed within precincts which now seemed to me scarcely wider than those within which the emmet plies her daily task. In the career which was now opening to me, I required a far different instrumentality to give scope to my new faculties, and to accomplish the ends to which I had learned to aspire. Emancipated from the petty cares and the mean pursuits in which, during the period of my humanity, I had been immersed, I now inhabited and informed a spiritual body, not dissimilar in outward semblance to that which I had bequeathed to the worms, but uniform in texture, homogeneous in every part, and drawn from elements blended harmoniously together, into one simple, pure, and uncompounded whole. Into such perfect unison had my mental and my corporeal nature been drawn, that it was not without difficulty I admitted the belief that I was once again clothed with a material integument. Experience was soon to convince me that such an association was indispensable to the use and to the enlargement of my intellectual and moral powers.

Emerging from the region of separate spirits into my next scene of activity and social intercourse, I found myself an inhabitant of the great luminary, around which Mercury and his more distant satellites eternally revolve. In all their unmitigated radiance were floating around me, those effulgent beams of light and heat which so faintly visit the obscure and distant planets. Everlasting day, the intense glories of an endless summer noon,

I anticipated the results of the observations which I gradually learned to make of the difference between solar and planetary existence; for on my entrance into this untried state of being, my thoughts were long riveted to the change which I had myself undergone. While incarcerated in my tenement of clay, I had given law to my nerves, muscles, and tendons; but they had in turn imposed restraints on me against which it had been vain to struggle. My corporeal mechanism had moved in prompt obedience to each successive mandate of my mind; but so fragile were the materials of which it was wrought, that, yielding to inexorable necessity, my will had repressed innumerable desires which, if matured into absolute volitions, would have rent asunder that frail apparatus. I had relaxed the grasp, and abandoned the chase, and thrown aside the uplifted weapon, as often as my overstrained limbs admonished me that their cords would give way beneath any increased impetus. And when the living power within me had subjected my fibres to the highest pressure which they could safely endure, the arrangement, and the relative position of my joints and muscles, had impeded all my movements, except in some circumscribed and unalterable directions. But my spiritual body, incapable of waste or of fracture, and responsive at every point to the impact of the indwelling mind, advanced, receded, rose or fell, in prompt obedience to each new volition, with a rapidity unimpeded, though not unlimited, by the gravitating influence of the mighty orb over the surface of which I passed. At one time I soared as with the wings of eagles, and at another penetrated the abysses of the deep. The docile and indestructible instrument of my will could outstrip the flight of the swiftest arrow, or rend the knotted oak, or shiver the primeval rocks; and then, contracting its efforts, could weave the threads of the gossamer in looms too subtle and evanescent for the touch of the delica Ariel.

I exercised senses for which the languages of earth have no names, and received intimations of properties and conditions of matter unutterable in human discourse. Employing this instrument of universal sensation, the inner forms of nature presented themselves before me as vividly as her exterior types. Thus entering her secret laboratories, I was present at the composition and the blending together of those plastic energies of which mundane philosophy is content to register some few of the superficial results. Each new disclosure afforded me a wider and still lengthening measure of that unfathomable wisdom and power, with the more sublime emanations of which I was thus becoming conversant. Such was the flexibility of my spiritualized organs, that at my bidding they could absolutely exclude every influence from without, leaving me to enjoy the luxuries of meditation in profound and unassailable solitude.

While on earth I had, like Milton, bewailed | me in aspects till now unimagined. I did not that constitution of my frame which admitting merely see, and hear, taste, smell, and feel, but to knowledge of visible objects only at one entrance, forbade me to converse with them except through the medium of a single nerve, and within the narrow limits of the retina. Had the poet's wish been granted, and if, departing from her benignant parsimony, nature had exposed his sensorium to the full influx of the excitements of which it was inherently susceptible, that insufferable glare would either have annihilated the percipient faculty, or would have quickened it to agonies unimagined even by his daring fancy. Under the shelter of that material structure which at once admitted and mitigated the light, I had in my mortal state been accustomed to point my telescope to the heavens; and, while measuring the curve described round their common centre by stars which to the unaided eye were not even disunited, I had felt how infinitely far the latent capacities of my soul for corresponding with the aspect of the exterior world transcended such powers as could be developed within me, While thus I passed along the solar regions, while confined to the inadequate organs of and made endless accessions of knowledge, I vision afforded me by nature or by art. An was at first alarmed lest my mind should have immortal, I quaffed at my pleasure the streams been crushed beneath the weight of her own of knowledge and of observation for which be- conquests, and the whole should be merged in fore I had thus panted in vain. I could now one chaotic assemblage of confused recollecscan and explore at large the whole physical tions. From this danger I was rescued by creation. At my will I could call my visual another change in my animal economy. Durpowers into action to the utmost range of their ing my planetary existence, the structure and susceptibility; for in my new body I possessed the health of my brain had exercised a dethe properties of every different lens in every spotic authority over my intellectual powers. possible variety of combination-expanding, Then my mind laboured ineffectually over her dissecting, and refracting at any required angle most welcome tasks, if accident or indigestion the beams which radiated from the various relaxed, distended, or compressed my cerebral substances around me, it brought me intelli- vessels. For the time, the tools with which gence of the forms, the colours, and the move- she wrought were deprived of their brightness ments of them all. Assisted by this optical and their edge. At such seasons, (and they incarnation, I could survey the luminary on were frequent,) the records of past sensations, which I dwelt, the globes whose orbits were and of the thoughts associated with them, beconcentric there, and, though less distinctly, came illegible in my memory, or could be read the other solar spheres which glowed in the there only in disjointed fragments. An acid firmament above me. Not more clearly had I on his stomach would have rendered vain the deciphered during my sojourn on earth the boast of Caesar, that he could address each of shapes and hues of the various beings by which his legionaries by name. Even when all my it is replenished, than I now discerned the as- pulses were beating with regularity and vigour, pect and the movements of the countless spe- the best I could accomplish was to grope backcies, animate and inanimate, with which the ward through my store of accumulated knowprodigal munificence of creative will has peo-ledge, holding by a single thread, to which my pled the various planetary regions. attention was confined, and the loss of which defeated all my efforts.

Nor was it through the intervention of light merely, that my altered corporeity brought me How different the tablets on which my obinto communication with the works of the Di-servations of the past were recorded in my vine Architect. It attracted and combined for my study or my delight, all the vibratory movements, and all the gustatory and pungent emanations, by which the sense is aroused and gratified. Celestial harmony floated around me, and I breathed odours such as exhaled from Eden on the fresh dawn of the world's nativity. In that world, chained down by the coarse elements of flesh and blood, I had caught some transient glimpses of exterior things, through the five portals which openedshall I say into my fortress or my prison-house? From the glorious mansion which my soul now inhabited, pervious to myself at every point, though impregnable to every hostile or unwelcome aggression, I surveyed the things around

spiritual body! Unconscious of fatigue, incapable of decay, and undisturbed by any of those innumerable processes essential to the conservation of mortal life, it enabled me to inscribe in indelible lines, as on some outstretched map, each successive perception, and every thought to which it had given birth. At my pleasure, I could unroll and contemplate the entire chart of my past being. I could render myself as absolutely conscious of the former, as of the present operations of my mind, and at one retrospective glance could trace back to their various fountains all the tributary streams which combined to swell the current of my immediate contemplations. Gliding over the various provinces of the solar world,

and gathering in each new treasures of inforination, I deposited them all beyond the reach of the great spoiler, time, in this ample storehouse of a plenary memory. With the increase of my intellectual hoard, my cravings for such wealth continually augmented. It was an avarice which no gains could satiate, and to the indulgence of which imagination itself could assign no limit.

I should, however, have become the victim of my own avidity for knowledge, if my ideas had still obeyed those laws of association to which, in my telluric state, they had been subject. Then it behooved my reason to exercise a severe and watchful government. When her control was relaxed, my thoughts would break loose from all legitimate restraint. They arranged themselves into strange groups and fantastic combinations, and established with each other such alliances as whim, caprice, or accident suggested. These, once made, were indissoluble. They asserted their power but too often, in resistance to the sternest mandates of my judgment and my will. But in times of debility, of disease, or of sleep, my ideas would combine into heterogeneous masses, seething and mingling together, like the ingredients of some witch's caldron, assembled by her incantations to work out some still more potent spell. Over the whole of this intoxicating confusion presided carnality, in all her nervous, cerebral, vascular, and other forms, and working by means of all her digestive, secretory, and assimilating processes.

No longer the inmate of a tremulous and sordid tabernacle of flesh, but inhabiting a shrine pure and enduring as her own nature, my soul was now rescued from this ignoble thraldom. Accident, appetite, lassitude, the heat and fumes of my animal laboratory, had ceased to disturb the supremacy of reason. Instead of congregating as an undisciplined host, my ideas, as in some stately procession, followed each the other in meet order and predetermined sequence-their march unobstructed by any suggestions or desires originating in my sensuous frame. I had become, not the passive recipient of thought, but the unquestioned sovereign of my own mental operations. The material organs, by the aid of which I now wrought them out, obeyed a law like that on which depends the involuntary movements of the heart and arteries, unattended by any conscious effort, and productive of no fatigue. Every increment of knowledge spontaneously assumed in my memory its proper place and relative position; and the whole of my intellectual resources fell into connected chains of argument or illustration, which I could traverse at pleasure from end to end, still finding the mutual dependence and adhesion of each successive link unbroken.

To contemplate any truth in all the relations in which it stands to every other truth, is to possess the attribute of omniscience; but, in proportion as any created intelligence can combine together her ideas in their various species, genera, classes, and orders, in the same degree is diminished the distance from the Supreme Mind, immeasurable and infinite as the intervening gulf must ever remain. On earth I had been

compelled, by the feebleness of my cerebral and nervous economy, to render my studies almost exclusively analytical. There, I had toiled to disencumber every question of whatever might obscure the view of the isolated point proposed as the end of my inquiries. Morals apart from physics, art disunited from logic, the science of numbers and of space detached from the exercise of the imaginative power, even theology itself divorced from the devout aspirations to which she tends, had each in turn engaged my earnest pursuit. But to ascend those heights from which they could be contemplated as parts of one harmonious whole-to seize and to blend together the analogies pervading the works of poets and mathematicians, of naturalists and divines-this was an attempt which convinced me how indisso luble were the fetters which riveted my soul to her sluggish associate. Set free from this bondage, and supplied with an instrument of sensation which kept pace with her own inhe rent activity, she found and desired no repose. Solar time is measured by the revolutions of the planetary orbs, and from the commencement to the completion of his career through the firmament. Uranus still found me engaged in some unbroken contemplation. During that interval I had completed some vast synthesis, in which were at once combined and distinguished all the various aspects under which some province of knowledge had disclosed itself to my view. In the nether world, high discourse had been held on the connexion of the sciences; but now I discovered the mutual influence, the interaction, and the simultaneous workings of their different laws. I no longer cultivated the exact sciences as a separate domain, but the most severe physical truth was revealed to me in union with the richest hues of ideal beauty, with the perfection of the imitative arts, with the pure abstractions of metaphysical thought, with narratives both historical and romantic, with the precepts of universal morals, and the mysteries of the Divine government. Ontology-vain-glorious word as used among men-the knowledge of universal being as distinct from species, and of species as harmonized in universal being, was the study which engaged the time and rewarded the labours of immortal minds animating spiritual bodies.

Let not those who boast themselves in logic, Aristotelian or Baconian, assume that their puny architecture of syllogistic or inductive reasoning affords the rules by which the soul, rescued from the hindrances of a carnal corporcity, erects for herself edifices of knowledge, immovable in their base, beautiful in their proportions, and towering in splendid domes and pinnacles to the skies.

To Newton and to Pascal the theories of the vulgar geometry were as instinctly obvious as the preliminary axioms on which they rest While yet an infant, Mozart was possessed of all those complex harmonies which a life of patient study scarcely reveals to inferior masters of his art. In my planetary existence, I had rejoiced in my habitual aptitude for physiology and historical researches, nor had i regretted the years of ceaseless toil devoted to

them. Now, I discovered that in myself, as in the great men I have mentioned, the apprehensiveness of truth depended far more on the animal than the mental framework. Quick and vigorous in high bodily health, and sluggish and inert under the pressure of corporeal debility, I learned that logic, experiment, and calculation, had been but so many crutches to assist the movements of the halt and feeble; and that, with a physical instrumentality which study could not exhaust nor disease assail, intuition took the place of reasoning. I became rather the conscious witness than the agent of the process by which consequences were evolved from the premises brought under my notice.

treasured up by each member of the great solar family, not as a private hoard, to minister only to his own uses, but as a fund universally communicable, and still augmenting by constant interchange.

It is difficult, or impossible, to speak intelligibly, in the language of men, of the delights or of the duties of the state of being into which I had thus entered. Borne along in the vehicle of my spiritual body, I dreaded no fatigue, and was deterred by no danger in the discharge of the most arduous enterprises. Aspects of the creation, hidden from me while garmented in the gross elements of flesh and blood, now burst on my perception as light visits him who, in mature life, for the first time acquires In the society of which I had become a the visual faculty. Through each new avenue member, as in mundane communities, dis- of sense thus successively opened to me, my course was amongst the chief springs both of soul, with raptures such as seraphs feel, drew improvement and delight. So curiously fash- in from the still-expanding circumference wonioned was the integument within which my der and delight, and an ever-increasing conmind was enveloped, that, after the manner of sciousness of the depths of her own being and an eyelid, it could either exclude the access of resources. Contemplating the hidden forms any external excitement, creating within me and the occult mechanism of the material unian absolute and impregnable solitude, or lay verse, I left behind me the problems with which open to the immediate survey of an associate physical science is conversant, and advanced any thought or combination of thoughts which to that higher philosophy which investigates I desired to impart to him. I had acquired the properties of spiritual agents; and to a two distinct languages, one of visible signs, theology, compared with which that which I the other of audible symbols. The first was had hitherto acquired was as insignificant as analogous to the mute dialogue which is car- the inarticulate babblings of the cradle. My ried on in pantomime, by gesture and the vary- retrospective consciousness-for memory it ing expressions of the countenance; though, can scarcely be called-spread out before me unlike such discourse, it was exempt from all scenes, the bright, harmonious, and placid conjectural and ambiguous meanings. As in lights of which were mellowed though unoba camera obscura, my corporeal organs re- scured by distance. Misgivings as to the staflected the workings of the informing spirit; so bility of my own opinions had fled away, as that, like the ancient Peruvians, I could con- the truths with which I was engaged presented verse as by a series of pictures, produced and themselves to me simultaneously in their relashifted with instantaneous rapidity. This mode tive bearings and mutual dependence. Love, of communication served my turn when I had pure and catholic, warmed and expanded my any occurrences to relate, or any question to heart, as thoughts wise, equitable, and benign, discuss, of which sensuous objects formed the flowed from other minds into my own in a basis. But when phenomena purely psycho- continuous stream; the pellucid waters of logical, destitute of all types in the material which, in the inherent transparency of our recreation, were to be conveyed to a companion, generate nature, no deceit could darken and I had audible symbols, by which every intel- no guile pollute. My corporeal fabric, now lectual conception, and each fluctuating state become the passive instrument of my will, imof moral sentiment might be expressed as dis-portuned me with nc unwelcome intrusions; tinctly as geometrical diagrams express the but buoyant, flexible, and instinct with life and corresponding ideas to which they are allied. vigour, obeyed every volition, and obstructed By the intermixture of pictorial and symboli- the accomplishment of none. cal speech, I could thus render myself intelli- Yet had I not passed into that torpid Elysium gible throughout the whole range and compass of which some have dreamed, and over the of my mental operations, and could give utter- descriptions of which many more have slumance to all those subtle refinements of thought bered. Virtue, and her stern associate, Selfor of sensation, which, even amongst those control, exact obedience not from the denizens who spoke the vernacular tongue of Plato, of earth alone, but from the rational inhabitants must, from the want of fit and determinate of every province of the universal empire. indications have either died away in silence, With each accession of knowledge and of or have been exhaled in some mystic and un- mental power, my view became continually intelligible jargon. Whatever distinctness of wider and more extended of that gulf, which expression the pencil or vibratory chords ena-stretching out in measureless infinitude, sepabled Raphael or Handel to give to their sub-rates the Source of Being from the most exlime but otherwise ineffectual conceptions, I alted of his intelligent offspring. My affiance had thus the power to impart to each modifi- in the Divine wisdom and rectitude, reposing cation of thought, and to every shade of feel- on foundations deep and firm in proportion to ing. Verbal controversies, sophistry, and all my larger acquaintance with the ways of Prothe other "idols of the cavern," had disap-vidence, was still necessary to sustain my peared. Philosophy and her legitimate issue, trembling spirit as I meditated on the mystewisdom, piety, and love, were cultivated and ries of the Divine government. For, within

the reach of my observation, were discernible | from his lunar voyage, his first employment agonizing intensities of suffering, abysses of was to disenchant the infuriate knight, on pollution and of guilt, attesting the awful whose deliverance he had been bent when an powers both of endurance and of activity of ill-timed curiosity led him so far a-field. Even minds ejected from the defences, and despoiled so, returning from the solar sphere to which of the narcotics, once afforded them by their the theory of a future life has unexpectedly animal structure. Awakened to a sense of conducted us, we must dissolve the fiction untheir inherent though long-slumbering ener- der which we have thus far proceeded, and regies, they were captives. Exposed to every store the theorist himself to his sublunary life, painful excitement by which the sentient fa- which he is so well able to enjoy and to imculty can be stimulated, they were naked. prove. No longer the imaginary biographers Reading on the face of nature inscriptions till either of his terrestrial or his celestial career, now illegible, they saw in them their own con- but mere contemporary critics, we must exdemnation. Remembering each incident of empt him from all responsibility for so much their former existence, they found in each as a single word of this narrative of his immorfresh aliment for despair. Disabused of the tal existence. It exhibits, with at least no inillusions of sophistry and self-love, truth shed tentional inaccuracy, the substance of anticion them the appalling glare of inevitable light. pations, which, if regarded but as a chapter Interchanging thoughts without the possibility in some new Atlantus, might be borne with of disguise, every foul and malignant desire as indulgently as other Utopian discoveries, diffused among them a deadly contagion. Des- which the world has been none the worse for titute of any separate wants or interests, their contrasting with the genuine but vapid pleabodies could no longer minister to them the sures of this transitory state. That a veil abpoor relief of an alternation of distress. The solutely impenetrable conceals from us the reluctant and occasional spectator of such realities of that condition into which all the woes, I found in faith, and hope, and meek successive generations of men have passed, adoration, the solace which my labouring spi- and into which we are following them, no one rit required-a task commensurate with my will seriously dispute. But neither can it be now elevated powers, though the firmest and denied that to penetrate that dark abyss is at the holiest of mortals, while yet detained in his once a desire which has been felt, and an tenement of flesh, would have been crushed attempt which has been made by every race, and maddened beneath the burden of that fear- nay almost by every individual of our species. ful sight.

If Scipio had his dream of colloquies after death with the wise and good of all ages, the Esquimaux has his heaven where seal-skins may be procured in placid seas, and undying lamps are fed with inexhaustible supplies of the odorous grease of bears. Mahomet promised his Arabian converts "rivers of incorruptible water and rivers of milk, the taste whereof changeth not; gardens planted with shady trees, in each of which shall be two

In the schools of the world, I had wandered in the endless mazes of fate and free-will, and the origin of evil. An inhabitant of the great celestial luminary, I became aware of relations till then unheard of and inconceivable; between the Emanative Essence and the hosts of subordinate spirits, and of questions thence resulting, of such strange and mighty import, that, prostrating myself before the wisdom and benevolence of the Most High, I was still com-flowing fountains; couches, the linings wherepelled, in reverential awe, to acknowledge how inscrutable even to my expanded capacity was the thick darkness which shrouds his secret pavilion.

of shall be of thick silk interwoven with gold, and beauteous damsels, refraining their eyes from beholding any but their spouses, having complexions like rubies and pearls, and fine black eyes." The stream can rise no higher than the fountain. Our ideas of immortal good are but amplifications of our mortal enjoy

Nor were there wanting tasks, which summoned to the utmost height of daring the most courageous of the inhabitants of the sphere to which I had been translated. Glorious recom-ments. To sublimate our conceptions of felipense was to be won by deeds such as immor- city, by associating together all innocent and tal beings only could undertake or meditate. not incompatible delights, and by subtracting Ministers of the Supreme, we braved at his from them every alloy of pain, satiety, and bidding the privation of all other joys in the languor, is to create for ourselves the only delight of prompt obedience to his will. We heaven with the contemplation of which hope waged with his enemies fierce conflicts, and can be sustained and activity invigorated. He exposed ourselves to ills, intense during their who carefully surveys the Elysium which reacontinuance, in proportion to the exquisite sen- son or imagination has laid out and planted sibilities of our purified corporeity. Impelled for him in the next world, will acquire far by irresistible compassion, by the cravings of better acquaintance with the "happy gardens" insatiable benevolence, or by the vehement to which choice or fortune has directed him in desire to obtain or to impart tidings affecting the happiness of our own or of other orders of thinking beings, our active powers, with all our resources of constancy, magnanimity, and prudence, were called into habitual exercise; nor were there wanting dignities to be attained, or sceptres to be won, as the meet reward of illustrious achievements.

When Astolpho descended on the hippogriff

this. Judged by this standard, and giving him credit for having made his public confessions with entire candour, the author of the "Theory of a Future Life" may be esteemed a wise and happy man-wise, because he has no fear of acknowledging to himself or to others the dependence of his spiritual on his animal economy, and affects no superhuman disdain of mere bodily gratifications; and happy, because

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