Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls, like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
[506th STATION.]
Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner Man.
We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it. The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul. No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest, generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit. "Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water, are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I am Myrtil).
Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking, somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40 degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory, imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches and Jews;[[16]] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly cool, and at last together die!
He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse, corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the revived little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse outward one.