For Butler's style is hard and dry. A living Being undergoes a vicissitude by which on a sudden he passes from a state in which he has long, continued into a new state, and with it into a new scene of existence. The transition is from a narrow confinement into an ample liberty—and this change of circumstances is accompanied in the subject with a large and congruous increment of powers. They believe this who believe the Immortality of the Soul. But the fact is, that changes bearing this description do indeed happen in Nature, under our very eyes, at every moment; this method of progress being universal in her living kingdoms. Such a marvellous change is literally undergone by innumerable kinds, the human animal included, in the instant in which they pass out from the darkness and imprisonment of the womb into the light and open liberty of this breathing world. Birth has been the image of a death, which is itself nothing else than a birth from one straightened life into another ampler and freer. The ordering of Nature, then, is an ordering of Progression, whereby new and enlarged states are attained, and, simultaneously therewith, new and enlarged powers; and all this not slowly, gradually, and insensibly, but suddenly and per saltum.
TALBOYS.
This analogy, then, sir, or whatever there is that is in common to birth as we know it, and to death as we conceive it, is to be understood as an evidence set in the ordering of Nature, and justifying or tending to justify such our conception of Death?
NORTH.
Exactly so. And you say well, my good Talboys, "justifying or tending to justify." For we are all along fully sensible that a vast difference—a difference prodigious and utterly confounding to the imagination—holds, betwixt the case from which we reason, birth—or that further expansion of life in some breathing kinds which might be held as a second birth—betwixt these cases, I say, and the case to, which we reason, Death!
TALBOYS.
Prodigious and utterly confounding to the imagination indeed! For in these physiological instances, either the same body, or a body changing by such slow and insensible degrees that it seems to us to be the same body, accompanies, encloses, and contains the same life—from the first moment in which that life comes under our observation to that in which it vanishes from our cognisance; whereas, sir, in the case to which we apply the Analogy—our own Death—the life is supposed to survive in complete separation from the body, in and by its union with which we have known it and seen it manifested.
NORTH.
Excellently well put, my friend. I see you have studied Butler.
TALBOYS.