'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 documents 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 passes 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.'