[Footnote 27]: The new moon always rises with the sun, although dark and invisible.
[Footnote 28]: There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is granted even on this earth; to others, a limbus patrum in which joy and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time, have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being. And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not trebled and increased by anticipation, recollection, and sensibility; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore tears were only given to human eyes.
[Footnote 29]: Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our connection with the second world.
[Footnote 30]: The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other, and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course, considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.
[Footnote 31]: Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he, e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition 884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands immortality.
[Footnote 32]: Raphael died when he had finished the painting of the resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and disembodiment was being printed.
[Footnote 33]: So are the Vampires called.
[Footnote 34]: Fixlein stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by Einer Mustheil für Mädchen (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and followed by Some Jus De Tablette for Men. A small portion of the Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the two have the smallest relation to Fixlein.--Ed.
[Footnote 35]: J. P. H., Jean Paul Hasus, Jean Paul, &c., have in succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German designation, either in writing or speech, is never Richter, but Jean Paul.--Ed.