March, 1900.
APPENDIX TO THE FIRST EDITION
THE first suggestion of the idea worked out in this paper, that the spirits of the dead continue to exist in the living as individuals, came to me through a conversation with my friend Professor Billroth, then living in Leipzig, now in Halle. While this idea, in a series of related images, both appealed to me and awakened kindred ones, it took prominent shape, and through a sort of enforced progression extended to the idea of a higher life of spirits in God. Meanwhile the originator, as in the philosophy of religion in general, so especially in the doctrine of immortality, took a quite different line from this, conforming more directly to the church dogma, which led him away, for the most part, if not wholly, from this fundamental idea, so that, while I had thought it necessary to point to him as its author, I no longer venture to call him its advocate. The views of this philosopher upon the subject in question will be developed in a work by him shortly to appear.
Written in Gastein in
August, 1835.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
CHAPTER I
MAN lives upon the earth not once, but three times. His first stage of life is a continuous sleep; the second is an alternation between sleeping and waking; the third is an eternal waking.
In the first stage man lives alone in darkness; in the second he lives with companions, near and among others, but detached and in a light which pictures for him the exterior; in the third his life is merged with that of other souls into the higher life of the Supreme Spirit, and he discerns the reality of ultimate things.
In the first stage the body is developed from the germ and evolves its equipment for the second; in the second the spirit unfolds from its seed-bud and realizes its powers for the third; in the third is developed the divine spark which lies in every human soul, and which, already here through perception, faith, feeling, the intuition of Genius, demonstrates the world beyond man—to the soul in the third stage as clear as day, though to us obscure.
The passing from the first to the second stage is called birth; the transition from the second to the third is called death.