CHAPTER XV.
But if the soul might not take up and solve the problem for want of time and space, we at this writing are not so limited.
First, let us state it clearly. If death does not mean a loss of consciousness necessarily, what is its distinguishing feature as compared with life? And what, if anything, is there in it to dread? The confusion of mind so general on these topics can be accounted for in a very simple manner.
The body has its life and its death, and the soul has its life and its death, and we have but two words to describe the four conditions. This makes it so nearly impossible to generalize on the subject and at the same time maintain clearness.
For while the student of natural history attributes life and death to the body alone, and the idealist goes to the other extreme and makes life and death purely subjective—attributes of mind, not matter—the philosopher who would have his mind open on both sides, not only to those thoughts which enter unheralded, but also to those which seem to have their origin in physical vibrations and enter the sensorium through the body,—the philosopher, I say, finds it necessary to discriminate carefully in the use of these words, life and death, and to make it clear which is meant, the body or the soul, whenever he attributes either condition to man.
I have said the two words cover four conditions. What are they? In the first the body is alive, and the soul is alive. Beautiful condition of ingenuous youth! In the second, the body is alive, and the soul dead. The man who by a course of persistent indulgence in all manner of crime and sensuality has stifled the voice of conscience, and finally reached the point where he is ready to say, "Evil, be thou my good," attains to a form of quiet.
The soul dies, and its decaying powers are absorbed by the body, which becomes henceforth an embodied poison, most dangerous and even deadly to the contact of the sensitive.
The third condition is that of the soul first described, in which the body has either temporarily or permanently parted with its life, while the soul remains intact. Still a part of the world's seething life, because action and reaction of the powerful causative soul-currents continue with such a soul, the interment of the body will decide whether the temporary physical death shall become permanent or not. In those exceptional cases where the body is preserved from the paroxysms of a blind grief which, when they include contact, tend to snap the last thread of vitality, or, still more important, from the embalmer's ignorant knife, which slays unnumbered thousands—when the body is preserved from both these dangers by a previous isolation, great possibilities are in store.