"But upon whom were the experiments to be made?" said I; "for unless they were beings of the same intellectual and moral condition as themselves, I see not how aught could come of it."
"O, be satisfied," he replied; "the beings who are provided for these Projectors are as like the inhabitant of your world as one egg is like another. They are men themselves; communities made up of those who have lived in your world, and who have gone out of it with the same thoughts, passions, and emotions as they had on earth; many of them having rejected or disregarded the true revelation, and others never having had that revelation to reject. Of course they are ignorant, in this intermediate state, of the tricks which these experimenters play with them, till they are concluded; but in rejecting the new revelations, many of them reject the very conditions of belief which when on earth they said would have been sufficient, while the result in those who make the experiment and in those on whom the experiment is made is to 'vindicate the ways of God to man.'"
There is a wonderful power in getting over trifling difficulties in our dreams, or I should certainly have demurred to some parts of this statement. Instead of that, I let my mind, as usual in such cases, dwell on a point which was no difficulty at all. "If," said I, "they are dead, they are probably very different beings from what they were when alive."
"And do you think," said he, with an unpleasant half-sneer, "that mere change of place makes any difference in man, or that the merely physical effects of death operate a magical change on his intellect, affections, emotions, and volitions, or can render him a more reasonable creature than he was before?"
"I did not mean exactly that," said I; "but surely it is not possible that the soul without the body can be exactly like the soul with it."
"Have not your philosophers," said he, "often founded, or pretended to found, scepticism on the argument that it is difficult to tell whether life itself may not be a series of illusions like those in dreams? Have they not even declared, that, as in dreams all seems to be real, so in their waking moments all may be no more than a dream? nay, have not some said that it is impossible to tell which is the real and which the dreaming part of their existence?"
"There have been such," said I, "but I never knew any one convinced by their reasoning."
"Perhaps not," he answered, "but it may be of use to show you, that in that intermediate state men may, as in dreams, be capable of a series of thoughts and emotions exactly similar to what they experienced in this world; quite as vivid, and," he added with a quiet smile, "perhaps as rational."
"But they must be more coherent than those which now visit our slumbers," said I.
"It is hardly worth while to contend about the difference," he replied, with a sarcastic expression which I did not much like. "It is sufficient to say, however, that these projectors have no reason to complain; for with whatever show of reason men think or act here, so under exactly the same laws of thought and emotion do those shadows act there."