and set all in the same circle; observe the dependence of the parts of each system, and, if our minds are big enough to grasp the theory, of the several systems upon one another, from whence results the harmony of the universe." If the spirit be immortal, these desires must doubtless be gratified; so much even nature would expect with joy and assurance. Henry More says, of the disembodied soul, "She is one orb of sense, all eye, all airy ear." There is, however, something even painful in the thought of varieties of existence so far beyond our present capacity of imagination. But it is softened by the remembrance that this world is as wonderful as any which can open upon us hereafter; and that both are the work of the same power, and under the same supreme control. We know that whatever we are called to meet becomes familiar as we approach; and that our souls are perpetually growing to their natural destiny. XXXVII. Natural Consciousness of a Life after Death. "The soul, uneasy and confined from home, POPE. THAT death should be the termination of the existence of a human soul, the very consciousness of that soul in the act of death seemed to deny and disprove. Very often, up to the moment of departure, it resembled much more a bird spreading its wings for a strong flight, than one that folds them for sleep in its nest. Where it was otherwise, the causes were of the same nature with those which, during life, from time to time press on the bodily organs, and produce a temporary or partial unconsciousness. The continuance of consciousness to the last, itself a strong token of immortality, has been sustained by added proofs, drawn from a multitude of analogies. Plants, fading in autumn, and renewed in spring; insects emerging from the chrysalis, with bright pinions; night, brightening into day, as day has darkened into night; the life that is everywhere blooming up from the very ruins of death: all have furnished comparisons, and some have yielded evidence. Besides, a train of arguments, even such as aided Socrates in his last discourse with his friends, have been borrowed from sources Little still less reliable; as, from the mere necessity, that as death grows out of life, so life should grow out of death, or from the notion of the pre-existence of souls. To such analogies other analogies may be opposed; to such arguments, arguments scarcely less effective. The breath, or wind, or air, from which the soul or spirit has its name, passes, and is lost as the lightest of all things. In vegetables and in brutes, the species is continued; but the individual, even if renewed from season to season, quite perishes at last. A perpetual succession of beings, rather than the revival of the same being, may be suggested by the course of the seasons. is demonstrated by reasons brought from the nature of the soul, as an immaterial, uncompounded essence, incapable of being dissipated or dissolved. The truth is, that these and other arguments, which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, are but the efforts of the mind to find a defence for believing what it previously desired, and was even constrained, to believe, by its own consciousness. It wishes, it longs, it expects to live onward; it cannot bring itself to feel that its course is to come at once to an end; it is sensible that the purpose of a being like its own would then be incomplete. To demonstrate this may exceed the wisdom of the profoundest philosopher; to feel it has been the privilege of all mankind, except the subtle and the skeptical. The most stupid amongst the heathen Greenlanders were struck with horror at the idea of annihilation. It is not difficult, perhaps, to prove, as an abstraction, that the soul does not perish with the body. In vain might atheists, like Fouché, endeavour to crush the instinct of nature, by writing on the churchyard gates, "Death is an eternal sleep." But may not the soul be withdrawn from its personal, individual existence, into that general mass of life from which it was taken at first? May it not be, like the animating principle in vegetables and mere animals, something which may be continued in other individuals or other species, but which ceases to dwell in a single being conscious of his identity? Socrates and Plato contended for the immortality of the soul, because they said that all knowledge was remembrance, and that the soul had existed before its union with the body. But, if so, there was no chain of conscious identity between the present life and the past, and there might be none between the present and the future. Such an immortality was not that for which the human spirit longed, and accordingly the conclusions of Socrates went far beyond his reasonings. He expected a life of personal continuance; his ignorance, he said, would soon be dispelled; but he knew not this from his own argument, and he was as much sustained by representations drawn from the poets as by all his philosophy. He was determined to believe; he followed the dictates of his own nature; and those dictates were expressed in the popular feeling of the ancients, in the aspirations and even in the fictions of poets, and in the solemn meditations of the bereaved. Frederick Schlegel says, that we can hardly give the name of faith to "the conception of the immortality of the soul among the primitive nations;" for it was "a lively certainty, like the feeling of one's own being, and of what is actually present." In all the ancient world, as in all the modern tribes, except, possibly, the most abject of all, there was always an expectation of a life to come, usually taking a form which connected the future man with his very pursuits in this life. The hunter was buried with his bow, that he might use it in the unseen land; servants were even slain, that they might attend their master; and the Hindoo widow consumed herself on the funeral pile of her husband, in the confidence that their union would be perpetual. In the classic nations of antiquity, the retributions of Elysium and of Tartarus were, to the popular mind, as much realities as the existence of superior beings. Lucretius treated both as equally popular delusions. The belief of the people, in fact, retained the primitive consciousness; a consciousness so universal that, even in the Old Testament, the immortality of the soul was rather presupposed than formally and frequently asserted. It was never a discovery; those who denied it were always the fewer and the later. The poets described as poets; but their boldest fictions would have been tasteless and powerless, had they not found in the reader this strong consciousness. Some of their images appear to have been borrowed from the patriarchal and Hebrew belief, through uncertain tradition. Other passages spring up directly from the heart. The heroes of Homer pass into a world of deep shadows; and, though the Hades to which he makes Ulysses descend is far less distinct and impressive than that of Virgil, yet the dead have all the traits of the living. "O dearest Harmodius," exclaims an Athenian poet, "thou art not dead; but in the islands, they say, of the blessed, where, they say, are the swift-footed Achilles, and Diomed Tydides." In a lofty and solemn strain, Pindar reveals the deep belief which lay behind all their mythology. But it is in the personal expectations of the bereaved, and of those who were approaching the grave, that the reality of the ancient belief is most palpably evident. Even in the skeptical verses of Adrian, to his own soul, |