"I am sorry to find you so ill to-day, dear Maimon," said the pastor.
"There will perhaps be some improvement yet," replied Maimon.
"You look so ill," his friend proceeded, "that I am doubtful about your recovery."
"What matters it after all?" said Maimon. "When I am dead, I am gone."
"Can you say that, dear friend," rejoined the clergyman, with deep emotion. "How? Your mind, which amid the most unfavourable circumstances ever soared to higher attainments, which bore such fair flowers and fruits—shall it be trodden in the dust along with the poor covering in which it has been clothed? Do you not feel at this moment that there is something in you which is not body, not matter, not subject to the conditions of space and time?"
"Ah!" replied Maimon, "these are beautiful dreams and hopes"——
"Which will surely be fulfilled," his friend broke in; and then, after a short pause, added, "You maintained not long ago that here we cannot reach further than to mere legality. Let this be admitted; and now perhaps you are about to pass over soon into a condition, in which you will rise to the stage of morality, since you and all of us have a natural capacity for it. Why? Should you not wish now to come into the society of one whom you honoured so much as Mendelssohn?"
The zealous pastor says he gave the conversation this turn on purpose, in order to touch this side of the philosopher's heart. After a while the dying man exclaimed, "Ay me! I have been a foolish man, the most foolish among the most foolish—and how earnestly I wished it otherwise!"