But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one. Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest human desire,
"How speeds, from in the river's thought,
The spirit of the leaf that falls,
Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought,
As mine among yon crimson walls!
From the dry bough it spins, to greet
Its shadow on the placid river:
So might I my companions meet,
Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"
Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,
"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god;"
but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous satire of good old Henry More,
"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd: grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt philosophize!"
The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first critical probe.
The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that at death they pass from the separate material worlds, which are their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,
"We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth,
On the last verge of mortal being stand,
lose to the realm where angels have their birth,
Just on the boundaries of the spirit land."
Why has God "broken up the solid material of the universe into innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of an impassable solitude of space," unless it be to train up in the various spheres separate households for final union as a single diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly, that,