"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pass into the temperate ones (it would be distillatio per latus), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer human beings[[23]] like ourselves."
Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have passed all these cornfields."
Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; three soul-worlds and heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly imagine we create them, while we merely recognize them. After which copy, with what plastic material, and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[[24]] this same spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the atheist denies the great original of the copy.[[25]]
"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the inner world, who deduct the being from the seeming, the sound from the echo, the fact from its appearance; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist thinks himself both originator and founder.
"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second world,--another beyond the universe."
Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, "who suffers innocently."
"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of life through countless ages. The chord of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious existence. Why, and from whence were these super-earthly wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal wings?"
Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers have been given to us for the enjoyment and preservation of the present life?"
"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood, and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.