38 Volger, Erde and Ewigkeit. (Natural History of the Earth as a Periodical Process of Development in Opposition to the Unnatural Geology of Revolutions and Catastrophes.) Treise, Dag Endlose der grossen und der kleinen materiellen Welt.
thinker there is no ascent or descent or terminating wall in space, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and no absolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable one from the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to that incomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to be noted by the awful nebula of the Hour Glass, although its rushing sands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondage emancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him with their wings, Like anger'd eagles cheated of their prey."
We have now sufficient premonitions and examples of this wondrous enlargement to base a rational belief on. What hems us in when we think, feel, and imagine? And what is the heaven that shall dawn for us beyond the veil of death's domain but the realm of Thought, the sphere of the spirit's unhampered powers? There are often vouchsafed to us here hours of outsoaring emotion and conception which make the enclosures in which the astronomer loiters seem narrow. "His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary." There are moods of spiritual expansion and infinite longing that illustrate the train of thought so well expressed in the following lines:
"Even as the dupe in tales Arabian
Dipp'd but his brow beneath the beaker's brim,
And in that instant all the life of man
From youth to age roll'd its slow years on him,
And, while the foot stood motionless, the soul
Swept with deliberate wing from pole to pole;
So when the man the Grave's still portal passes,
Closed on the substances or cheats of earth,
The Immaterial, for the things earth glasses,
Shapes a new vision from the matter's dearth:
Before the soul that sees not with our eyes
The undefined Immeasurable lies." 39
Then we realize that the spiritual world does not form some now unseen and distant region of the visible creation, but that the astronomic universe is a speck lying in the invisible bosom of the spiritual world. "Space is an attribute of God in which all matter is laid, and other attributes he may have which are the home of mind and soul." We suppose the difference between the present embodied and the future disembodied state to be so vast that the conditions of the latter cannot be intelligibly illustrated by the analogies of the former. It is not to be expected that the human soul will ever be absolutely independent of time and space, literally transcending them, but only relatively so as compared with its earthly predicament.
39 Bulwer, King Arthur, book xi.
For, as an able thinker and writer a philosopher of the Swedenborgian school, too has said, "The conception of a mind absolutely sundered from all connection with space is a mere pretence which words necessarily repudiate."
The soul on the hypothesis that there is a soul is now in the body. Evidently, on leaving the body, it must either be nowhere, and that is annihilation, which the vehement totality of our thought denies; or everywhere, and that implies infinity, the loss of finite being in boundless Deity, a conclusion which we know of nothing to warrant; or somewhere, and that predicates a surviving individuality related to surrounding externals, which is the prophesied and satisfactory result in which we rest in faith, humbly confessing our ignorance as to all the minutia. It does not necessarily follow from this view, however, that the soul is limited to a fixed region in space. It may have the freedom of the universe. More wonders, and sublimer than mortal fancies have ever suspected, are waiting to be revealed when we die:
"For this life is but being's first faint ray, And heaven on heaven make up God's dazzling day."
We are here living unconsciously engirt by another universe than the senses can apprehend, thinly veiled, but real, and waiting for us with hospitable invitation. "What are those dream like and inscrutable thoughts which start up in moments of stillness, apparently as from the deeps, like the movement of the leaves during a silent night, in prognostic of the breeze that has yet scarce come, if not the rustlings of schemes and orders of existence near though unseen?" Perchance the range of the abode and destiny of the soul after death is all immensity. The interstellar spaces, which we usually fancy are barren deserts where nonentity reigns, may really be the immortal kingdom colonized by the spirits who since the beginning of the creation have sailed from the mortal shores of all planets. They may be the crowded aisles of the universal temple trod by bright throngs of worshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may be suffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existence of physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervade some solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So, doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterly eluding our finest senses. "A fact," Emerson says, "is the last issue of spirit," and not its entire extent. "The visible creation is the terminus of the invisible world," and not the totality of the universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from the rock to the flower, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probable that the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks of spiritual existence successively rise peopling the seeming abysses unto the very confines of God?