"It is because science explains those things, and I believe in her."
"Science! why, you are too clever not to admit of her inability to give you a full explanation of any one thing. Science proves that the fact exists, but she does not explain the first cause of its existence. She discovers the eternal laws which rule the universe, and it is by that means that she conducts the unprejudiced spirit from the discovery of things created to the knowledge of the Creator of all things; but the first causes of these same laws are utterly unknown to her."
"And what tells you that she will not yet discover them?"
"Never! For if the human understanding is immense, yet it is not infinite. We have seen many discoveries and marvels; our great-grandchildren will witness yet many more; but these will not be produced in any more developed sense than that which I just now indicated to you. The first causes will ever rest unknown to them as for us."
"But where are the proofs which prove the existence of the soul, and render it palpable to the eyes of the understanding?"
"The eyes of the heart, do they not equal those of the understanding?" quickly answered the count. "What! You feel within yourself a soul which thinks and which loves, which possesses in itself a longing for happiness, a thirst for truth, so utterly beyond the happiness and the truths of this world that it can only be a souvenir or a revelation, from on high, of something purer and more perfect; you love the good and you spurn the evil, even to self-sacrifice; nay, more, you prefer death to the evil; you hear in the depths of your heart that powerful voice which cries to all humanity that the soul cannot die; and yet you ask for a proof of the existence of this soul, and of its immortality! Death is visible to us on every side. He menaces us; he presses upon us; all that is above, beneath, on each side of us, is dead or dying. Man alone drives back before him that supreme law of final decay and oblivion; he whose life is comparatively much shorter than that of all other existences in this world, he alone hopes for an eternity which has no type here below, and which he could not even have conceived in himself, had it not been revealed to him. Surrounded by errors, he dreams the truth; wretched in this life, he dreams of a happiness without alloy; mortal, he dreams of immortality. Is not all this an infallible proof of his future destiny? God, who created man, would not he be both cruel and unjust had he given him all these profound aspirations toward a future state of happiness, only to plunge him finally in the abyss of eternal death? That secret voice speaks to you also, my friend; it resounds in the silence of your heart, and offers to you, as it does to others, its consoling hopes. Why do you not listen to it? When you saw before you, pale and discolored, destined to an inexorable decay, the body of her whom you so much loved; when the mouth that had so lately spoken to you, closed for ever; when those eyes, in which you had ever read their tenderness, became fixed, dull, and without expression; when that hand, which had but a moment before sought yours to press it for a last time, fell for ever powerless, equally insensible to the kisses with which you covered it, and to your tears, which rained on it—" Here the baron, without trying to hide his emotion, dried, with the back of his hand, the tears that this recollection of his beloved Gertrude caused him. The count continued: "That mouth, those eyes, that hand, they are the same; but where is the soul which animated them? Did you not then hear that interior voice which called with yet greater force, Thou shalt see her again? That body which the earth will hide to-morrow is but the form, and not the essence—the outward shape, but not the living spirit. A soul which you loved, and which rendered to thee an equal affection, animated that form, and rendered it palpable to your senses; that soul has fled, and the body falls back lifeless. The outward form rests here motionless and insensible, but the soul has remounted toward that celestial country where it shall await your coming, ready again to love you with an affection which shall have to suffer no second separation. And this is so true, my friend, that even whilst you deny this consciousness that the soul has of its future life and of its existence, you yourself obey that feeling; for you are faithful, not to the simple memory of Gertrude, but to Gertrude whom you feel to be still living, though far distant from you, and you desire to be able to say to her, when the moment of your meeting shall come: 'Thou seest that no other love has ever been mingled with thine in my heart; my own beloved one, thou didst wait for me, and I am come as full of thy recollection and of thy love as on that day when thou didst leave me.'"
Whilst the count was thus speaking, the baron had literally hidden himself in clouds of smoke, out of which came forth, by and by, a voice, trembling and changed by deep emotion, which answered:
"Ah! that I could believe as you do! In taking away from men these consoling thoughts, the materialists cried loudly that they were but working for the happiness of humanity yet wrapped in the shades of superstition; whilst, in truth, they were but plunging it into a gulf yet more profound and more implacable; for there is no real happiness possible where there exists a constant fear of losing that happiness. I know very well that the error was much more pleasant than the truth, and that in place of the hope, perhaps false, but certainly full of consolation, to re-find our friends one day, they have left us but the terrible certainty of having for ever lost them, and that they leave us with the heavy burden of misery which is crushing human nature, after having broken the very support that aided man to bear its weight. Now that the evil is done, how remedy it? And if I do not believe, what must I do that I may believe?"
"Acknowledge humbly our utter helplessness; humble the pride of an imperfect reason, which is irritated by the thought that there is something above it; listen to our conscience which speaks within us; and then, meekly kneeling down before the God who has created the universe, repeat to him, with simplicity and faith, these words of the blind man in the gospel, who cried, 'Lord, that I may receive my sight!' God is not deaf to persevering prayer. Pray, therefore, and you shall see likewise."
"Certainly," said the baron, "if I saw, I should at once believe; but who ever saw a soul?"