7 Engel, Wir werden uns wiedersehen. Halst, Beleuchtung der
Hauptgrunde fur den Glauben an Erinnerung und Wiedersehen nach dem
Tode. Streicher, Neue Beitrage zur Kritik des Glaubens an
Ruckerinnerung nach dem Tode.
Received as a truth, it is a well of inexhaustible comfort, making experience a green oasis where it overflows. The denial of it as a proven falsehood is a withering blast of dust blowing on the friendly caravan of sojourners in the desert of life. If existence is the enjoyment of a largess of social love, and death is to have a solitary hand snatch it all away forever, how dismal is the prospect to the poor heart that loves and clings, loses and despairs, and can only falter hopelessly on! It cannot be so. Love is the true prophet. Heaven will restore the treasures earth has lost.
The mourner by the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel! Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in history to brood over the ashes of departed ages, dropping the tears of her grief and faith into the future to restore her deceased children to life and draw them together within her embrace. And that sublime Rachel will not easily be comforted except when her thoughts, migrating whither her offspring have gone, seem to find them happy in some happy heaven.
The poet, lover of his race, who cannot trust his happier instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness, but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, In the unchangeable fulness of an infinite bliss, all specialties will be merged and forgotten, and I shall be one of those to whom "the wearisome disease" of remembered sorrow and anticipated joy "is an alien thing."
8 Wieland's Euthanasia expresses disbelief in the preservation of personality and consciousness after death. The same ground had been taken in the work published anonymously at Halle in 1775, Plato and Leibnitz jenseits des Styx. See, on the other side of the question, Wohlfahrt, Tempel der Unsterblichkeit, oder neue Anthologie der wichtigsten Ausspruche, besonders neuerer Weisen uber Wiedersehen u. s. w.
CHAPTER VII.
LOCAL FATE OF MAN IN THE ASTRONOMIC UNIVERSE.
ACCORDING to the imagining of some speculative geologists, perhaps this earth first floated in the abyss as a volume of vapor, wreathing its enormous folds of mist in fantastic shapes as it was borne along on the idle breath of law. Ages swept by, until this stupendous fog ball was condensed into an ocean of fire, whose billows heaved their lurid bosoms and reared their ashy crests without a check, while their burning spray illuminated its track around the sable vault. During periods which stagger computation, this molten world was gradually cooled down; constant rivers wrung from the densely swathing vapor poured over the heated mass and at last submerged its crust in an immense sea. Then, for unknown centuries, fire, water, and wind waged a Titanic war, that imagination shudders to think of, jets of flame licking the stars, massive battlements and columns of fire piled to terrific heights, now the basin of the sea suddenly turned into a glowing caldron and the atmosphere saturated with steam, again explosions hurling mountains far into space and tearing the earth open in ghastly rents to its very heart. At length the fire was partially subdued, the peaceful deep glassed the sky in its bosom or rippled to the whispers of the breeze, and from amidst the fertile slime and mould of its sheltered floor began to sprout the first traces of organic life, the germs of a rude species of marine vegetation. Thousands of years rolled on. The world ocean subsided, the peaks of mountains, the breasts of islands, mighty continents, emerged, and slowly, after many tedious processes of preparation, a gigantic growth of grass, every blade as large as our vastest oak, shot from the soil, and the incalculable epoch of ferns commenced, whose tremendous harvest clothed the whole land with a deep carpet of living verdure. While unnumbered growths of this vegetation were successively maturing, falling, and hardening into the dark layers of inexhaustible coal beds, the world, one waving wilderness of solemn ferns, swept in its orbit, voiceless and silent, without a single bird or insect of any kind in all its magnificent green solitudes, the air everywhere being heavily surcharged with gases of the deadliest poison. Again innumerable ages passed, and the era of mere botanic growths reaching its limit, the lowest forms of animal life moved in the waters, the earliest creatures being certain marine reptiles, worms, and bugs of the sea. Then followed various untimed periods, during which animal life rose by degrees from mollusk and jellyfish, by plesiosaurus and pterodactyl, horrible monsters, hundreds of feet in length, whose tramp crashed through the woods, or whose flight loaded the groaning air, to the dolphin and the whale in the sea, the horse and the lion on the land, and the eagle, the nightingale, and the bird of paradise in the air. Finally, when millions of aons had worn away, the creative process culminated in Humanity, the crown and perfection of all; for God said, "Let us make man in our own image;" and straightway Adam, with upright form, kingly eye, and reason throned upon his brow, stood on the summit of the world and gave names to all the races of creatures beneath.1
At this stage two important questions arise. The first is, whether man is the final type of being intended in the Divine plan for this world, or whether he too is destined in his turn to be superseded by a higher race, endowed with form, faculties, and attributes transcending our conceptions, even as our own transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world. What animal can there be superior to me? beyond a question, my race shall possess the earth forever!" The mastodon could not know any uses of nature except those he was fitted to experience, nor imagine a being with the form and prerogatives of man. Therefore he would not believe that the mastodon race would ever be displaced by the human. We labor under the same disqualification for judgment. There may be in the system of nature around us adaptations, gifts, glories, as much higher than any we enjoy as our noblest powers and privileges are in advance of those of the tiger or the lark.
It is a remarkable fact that the mature states of the antediluvian races correspond with the foetal states of the present races, and that the foetal states of embryonic man are counterparts of the mature states of the lower races now contemporaneous with him. This great discovery of modern science, though perhaps destitute of logical value, suggests to the imagination the thought that man may be but the foetal state of a higher being, a regent temporarily presiding here until the birth and inauguration of the true king of the world, and destined himself to be born from the womb of this world into the free light and air of the spirit kingdom!