Part 4

How blind and self-interested is love here below! How narrow and egotistical a sentiment is friendship. It cannot enlarge itself without pain and difficulty, to embrace the totality of the human kind. Why is it so hard for it to lift itself up to the sublime Creator of the worlds? Why do we not love God as we love our neighbours? In the upper world it will be far otherwise. Our faculty of loving, limited here by fleshly bonds, will be set free there, from every sensual restraint. Man, resuscitated to glory, will love his wife as he loves his children, his friends, and his brethren. His affections will never more be degraded by his senses. The happiness which this purified sentiment, constantly received from ever living sources, will afford him, will suffice to fill and satisfy his soul. His power of loving will be extended to all nature, it will be spread abroad over the most elevated spheres; his soul will be exalted by the sublime sensations of this universal love, this wide sympathy with the whole creation. True charity, comprehending the entire universe, will burn in all hearts. The love of God will rule over all these multiplied affections, from the height of His infinite power, and the fervour of our sentiments of love for our kind will be crowned by our sublime adoration of the Creator of all.

But, it will be said, if superhuman beings are of no sex, how are they to be reproduced, how is the species to be kept up, and multiplied? There will be no need of reproduction, the species of the superhuman being will not require to be maintained, or multiplied. The reproduction, the preservation of his species is the business of the inhabitants of the inferior worlds, of the earth and the planets. Such is their lot, such the task imposed upon them by nature. But reproduction is unknown and unnecessary to the fortunate beings who dwell in the planetary ether. From the earth and the other planets fresh and ever fresh phalanxes are despatched to them. The battalions of the elect are recruited by arrivals from the lower worlds. Below is the multiplication of individuals; above is the sojourn of blessed beings, who have no need of maintaining their species, because the laws of their destiny differ from those which rule the lot of terrestrial man. Reproduction is the task of inferior worlds, permanence is the inheritance of the world above.

_The Soul of the Superhuman Being._ In an excellent volume of popular science, the _Universe_, by Dr. Pouchet, director of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen, we find a striking definition. Dr. Pouchet informs us that a German naturalist, Bremser, lays down, as a principle, that, in man, matter and spirit exist in almost equal parts; that is, to say, that man is half spirit and half matter. Bremser, in advancing this proposition, takes his stand upon the fact that, in man, it is sometimes spirit which governs and subdues matter, and sometimes matter which dictates laws to spirit, with equal power and success on the side of each.[3]

Admitting, with the German philosopher, that this relation is true, we would say, that, while in man the proportion of the soul is fifty in one hundred, this proportion, in the superhuman being, is undoubtedly from eighty to eighty-five in one hundred. Of course we only employ this valuation to make our idea comprehensible, and give these figures only to prove that facts in the intellectual order may be submitted to weight, measure, and comparison, all which the world supposes to be impossible.

The soul has a preponderating share in the superhuman being. That is what we need to know, and to remember. Let us now endeavour to analyze the soul of the superhuman being, as we have analyzed his senses.

If the senses of the superhuman being are numerous and exquisitely acute, the faculties of his soul, which are intimately allied to the exercise of the senses, and depend on their perfection, must also be singularly active and powerful. We know that in men the faculties of the soul are feeble and limited. We have so short a time to pass upon the earth, that very powerful faculties would be of no use to us; they would not have time to be developed, or efficaciously employed. But everything is magnified and elevated in the superior world which awaits us; consequently the faculties of the thinking creature who inhabits the realms on high must be numerous and of vast extent.

We must repeat, concerning the faculties of the soul of the superhuman being, what we have just said concerning his senses. The superhuman being must be provided with new faculties, and also those faculties which he has brought with him from the earth must be singularly perfected. To determine the nature and the object of the new faculties bestowed upon the superhuman being would be impossible, because those faculties belong to the superior world which is unknown to us; they respond to moral wants of which we have no conception. Let us, therefore, renounce all idea of discovering the nature of those new faculties, and content ourselves with examining the degree of perfection which may be attained by those faculties of the soul which actually belong to man.

Attention, thought, reason, will, and judgment, all which render us what we are, must acquire special force and sureness in the superhuman being. La Bruyère has said that there is nothing more rare in this world than the _spirit of discernment_; which means that judgment and good sense are excessively rare. When we have lived for a while among men, we recognize how thoroughly well founded the saying is. We may safely assert, without being over-misanthropical, that among a hundred men there will be not more than one or two possessed of sound judgment. In the majority of instances, ignorance, prejudices, and passion contend with judgment, so that, as La Bruyère says, good sense is much more rare than pearls and diamonds. This great and precious faculty of judgment, in which the majority of human beings are deficient, cannot be wanting in the inhabitants of the other world; there it must be the universal rule, here it is the exception.

The most precious of all faculties, enabling us to form large and lofty ideas and comparisons, whose outcome is knowledge, is memory. But how imperfect, changeable, weak, and, one may say, sickly, is our memory! It is absolutely mute respecting the whole period which preceded our birth, and during which, nevertheless, we existed. It is also as silent respecting all that concerns the early portion of our life. We retain no recollection of the care which was lavished upon our childhood. A child who loses its mother in infancy has never known a mother; for it, the mother has never existed. If those who saw us in the cradle did not recount our actions during that period, we should be entirely ignorant of them. We have to witness the successive stages of infancy, the sucking child, the long clothes, the staggering steps, the little go-cart, in order to realize that we too have been like that infant, have gone through those stages of being. Memory, which is not developed at all in man until he is a year old, and which becomes extinct in old men, is subject, even when it is at its highest point of activity, to innumerable weaknesses, caused by illness or the want of exercise, so that in fact our hold of this faculty is always precarious. We cannot doubt that in the other life it will have the power, the certainty, and scope which it lacks here below.

At the same time, our memory will be enriched by a number of new subjects. The soul, beholding and understanding the worlds which surround it, will be able to fix the geography of all those different places in its memory. It will know the physical revolutions, the populations, and the legislation of these thousand countries. The superhuman being will know what exists in such planets and their satellites as come within his reach, or as he shall visit. Just as, in order to gain information, we visit America or Australia, so the superhuman being visits Mars or Venus, and furnishes his memory with millions of facts, which it retains and reproduces at will. What immense power must memory, always supplied and always ready at call, bestow on the mind and reason!

Languages are only the expression and the assembling of ideas. Condorcet has said that a science always reduces itself to a well-constructed language. The mathematical sciences employ a language which is perfect, because the science of mathematics is perfect. The language spoken in the planetary spaces must be perfect, because it expresses all the knowledge of superhuman beings, and this knowledge is immense. The more the mind knows, the better it expresses:--the superhuman being, who is highly informed, will have a very expressive language, which will also be universal.

The language of mathematics is understood by the peoples of both hemispheres. Algebra can be read by a Frenchman or a German, as well as by an Australian or a Chinese, on account of the simplicity and perfection of the conventional signs which it uses. The language of mathematics, which is truly universal, makes us infer that the language spoken in the planetary space must be also universal, and common, without distinction, to all the inhabitants of the ethereal worlds.

Owing to the immense scope of their faculties, and to the perfection of their language, in itself a certain means of increasing and exalting their knowledge, superhuman beings have a power of reasoning, and a clearness of judgment, which, added to the immense number of facts stored in their memory, place them in possession of absolute science. Arduous questions, before which the mind of man humbly confesses its powerlessness, or which drive him mad if he persists in the effort to solve them, such as the thought of the Infinite, the idea of the First Cause of the Universe, the Essence of Divinity, all these problems, forbidden to us, are easily accessible to these mighty thinkers. He who is regarded by mankind as a genius of the first order, an Aristotle, a Keppler, a Newton, a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Molière, a Mozart, a Lavoisier, a Laplace, a Cuvier, a Victor Hugo, would be among them a babbling child. No science, no moral idea is above their conception. Beneath their feet rolls the earth, with the splendid train of the planets, its sisters; they behold the planets of our solar system gravitating in harmonious order round the great central star, which deluges them with its light. From the height of their sublime abode they witness the infinitely various spectacles furnished by the elemental strife of our poor globe, and those which resemble it; and, happier than terrestrial humanity, they admire the works of God, while knowing the secret of their mechanism. In the moral order they have penetrated the great _Wherefore_! They know why man exists, and why they themselves exist. They know whence they come, and whither they are going; and we, alas! know neither. Where, to our eyes, there is only confusion, they perceive harmony and order. The designs of God are distinctly apparent to them, and also the events of the lives of nations and individuals, which often seem to us cruel, unjust, and bad on the part of God; but they understand that these events are just and useful, and worthy of our heartfelt gratitude.

We also think, that in the ethereal spaces time is an element which does not count. We believe this, because time does not exist for God, and all superhuman beings approach, by their perfections, the entirely spiritual nature, and consequently approach God. We are confirmed in this belief by the fact, that very profound grief resists time, that there is no limit in duration to the great blows struck at the human soul, that the loss of a beloved being is felt as keenly after a long interval as when he was taken away.

Thus, time, which is everything to man, which is not only, according to the English adage, "money," but is also the instrument of our wisdom, our studies, and our attainments--far otherwise precious than money--time does not count in the life of the superhuman being. He awaits, without impatience and without suffering, the arrival of the beings whom he has loved and left upon the earth at his peaceful abode; and when their re-union takes place, he and they enjoy happiness which no inquietude concerning the future can ever trouble. Enabled to despise, to put aside the idea of time, the superhuman being looks on with unutterable serenity, tranquillity, and majesty, at the majestic spectacle, always new and always marvellous, of the revolutions of the stars, and the great movements of the universe.

_The Life of the Superhuman Being._--In completion of our speculation upon the attributes of the superhuman being, we shall consider the life which animates him and gives his body its active qualities.

We have said that, in our belief, the superhuman being proceeds from the soul of a man which has domiciled itself afresh, in a new body, in the bosom of the world of ether. Is this body destined, at the end of a more or less prolonged period to perish, to be dissolved, to restore its elements to matter, as they are restored by the human body? Shall life be withdrawn from the body of the superhuman being, and shall the soul take flight thence?

We believe that it will be so. Life everywhere implies death, and is its necessary term. We do not cast anchor in the current of the waters of life. If the soul of the superhuman being resides in a living body, this body must die, and its material elements must return to the common reservoir of nature. The torch of life is extinguished in the spaces, as it is extinguished upon earth.

We believe the superhuman being to be mortal. After an interval, whose duration we shall not attempt to fix, he dies; and the soul which dwelt within him escapes, like a sweet perfume from a broken vase. What becomes of the soul which has torn itself away from the body, cold in death? We shall seek after the answer to this question in our next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] "We must consider," says Bremser, "that man is not a spirit, but only a spirit limited, in different ways, by matter. In a word, man is not a god, but, notwithstanding the captivity of his spirit in his corporality, it retains sufficient freedom to enable him to perceive that he is governed by a spirit more exalted than his own, that is to say, by a God.

"It is to be presumed, in the supposition that there will be a new creation, that beings far more perfect than those produced by preceding creations will see the light. In the composition of man, spirit holds to matter the proportion of fifty to fifty, with slight occasional differences, because it is now matter, and again spirit which predominates. In a subsequent creation, should that which has formed man not prove to be the last, there will apparently be organizations in which spirit will act more freely, and be in the proportion of seventy-five to twenty-five.

"It results from this consideration that man, as such, was formed at the most passive epoch of the existence of our earth. Man is a wretched intermediary between animal and angel, he aspires to elevated knowledge, and he cannot attain to it; though our modern philosophers sometimes think so, it is really impossible. Man wishes to make out the primary cause of all that exists, but he cannot get at it. With less intellectual faculty, he would not have had the presumption even to desire to know these causes; and, if he were more richly endowed, they would have been clear to him."--_L'Univers_, pp. 760-761.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

WHAT BECOMES OF THE SUPERHUMAN BEING AFTER DEATH?--DEATHS, RESURRECTIONS, AND NEW INCARNATIONS IN THE ETHEREAL SPACES.

IN the living nature which surrounds us, there is a continually ascending scale of gradual perfection, from the plant to man. Taking mosses and algæ, which represent the rudimentary condition of vegetable organization, as our point of departure, we pass on through the whole series of the perfecting processes of the vegetable kingdom, and we reach the inferior animals, zoophytes and mollusca. From thence we ascend to the superior animals by insensible degrees, and thus fully attain to man. Each step of this ladder is almost imperceptible, so finely arranged are the transitions and the shades; so that there is a really infinite chain of intermediate beings, at one end of which are the algæ, and at the other ourselves. And yet we think it possible that between us and God there should be no kind of intermediate being! that in this scale of continual progress, there should be an immense void between man and the Creator! We think it possible that all nature, from the lowest vegetable to mankind, should be arranged in successive and innumerable degrees, and that between man and God there should exist only a desert, an immeasurable hiatus. Evidently, this is impossible, and that such an error should ever have been countenanced by religion and philosophy is only to be explained by ignorance of natural phenomena. It is impossible to doubt that between man and God, as between the plant and the animal, the animal and man, there exist a great number of intermediate creations, which establish the transition of humanity into the divinity which governs it, in infinite power and majesty.

That these intermediate beings exist, we are certain. They are invisible to us, but, if we refused to admit the existence of everything which we cannot see, we should be very easily refuted. Let a naturalist take a drop of water from a pond, and, shewing it to an ignorant person, tell him, "this drop of water, in which you do not see anything, is filled with little animals, and with miniature plants, which live, are born and die, like the animals and plants, which inhabit our farms." The ignorant person would probably shrug up his shoulders, and consider the speaker crazy. But if he were induced to apply his eye to the magnifier of a microscope, in order to examine the contents of the drop of water, he must acknowledge that the truth had been told him; because, in this drop of water, in which he could at first see nothing, his eye, when assisted by science, would discern whole worlds.

A great number of living beings can therefore exist where we see nothing, and it is feasible to science to open the eyes of the multitude in this respect.

We desire to assume the position of the naturalist of whom we have spoken. Between man and God, the ignorant crowd and a blind philosophy perceive nothing; but, when we replace the eyes of the body by those of the spirit, that is to say, when we make use of reason, analogy, and education, these mysterious beings come to light.

We have already, in studying the superhuman being, described one of those intermediate creations between man and the divinity, and defined the existence of one of those landmarks placed by nature on the high-road of infinite space. But the ladder does not break off at its first step, and we are convinced that numerous living hierarchies intervene between the superhuman being and the radiant throne of the Almighty. We have said elsewhere, that, in our belief, superhuman beings are mortal. What becomes of them after their death? Let us now take up the thread of our deductions.

We believe that--the superhuman being having died at the end of a term whose duration we have no means of knowing--his soul, perfected by the exercise of the new faculties which it has received, and the new senses with which it has been endowed, enters into a new body, provided with senses still more numerous and more exquisite, and endowed with faculties of still greater power, and thus commences a fresh existence.

We call the being who succeeds to man _angel_, or superhuman; we may call his succession in the ethereal realm, _arch-angel_, or _arch-human_.

The actual moment of the passage from one life to another, must be, as it is in the case of man, a time of moral and physical pain. The supreme periods at which a metamorphosis takes place in a sensible being are crises full of anguish and torment.

We will not endeavour to penetrate the secrets of the organization of the new being whose existence we thus trace, and who is superior to the superhuman being in the natural hierarchy; because our means of investigation fail us at this point. We have ventured to form some conjecture respecting the body, the soul, and the life of the superhuman being, because in that case, however adventurous our excursion into unknown spheres, we had a point of comparison and induction in the human species. But all induction respecting the arch-human being who succeeds the superhuman, is wanting, for we could only perceive the latter by means of conjectures and analogies which we must not carry farther.

We will, therefore, abstain from pursuing this kind of investigation, permitting the reader to exercise his own imagination upon the form of the body, the number and perfection of the senses, and the extent of the faculties of the happy creature who succeeds to the superhuman being, and who dwells, like him, in the immensity of ethereal space. We will only add that we do not think a second, a third, or a fourth incarnation arrests the succession of the chain of sublime creations, which float in the infinitude of the heavens, and which proceed from a primitive human soul, which has grown in perfection and in moral power. It surpasses our faculty to define, by the unassisted light of our reason and our knowledge, the number of these beings who go on succeeding one another in ever-increasing perfection. We can only say that we believe the creatures, which compose this ladder of perfections in succession, must be very numerous.

At every stage of his promotion in the hierarchy of nature the celestial being beholds the growth of those wings which symbolize his marvellous power to us. Each time his organs become more numerous, more flexible, have greater scope. He acquires new and exquisite senses. He acquires more and more power of extending his beneficent empire, of exercising his faculty of loving his fellows and all nature, and, above all, of comprehending and reading the designs of God. Deeper and deeper affections engage his soul, for the tenderness and the happiness engendered in its pure satisfaction, are granted to him to console him for the sufferings of death, to which he is always condemned. It is thus that the happiness of the elect is augmented. It is thus that the beings who inhabit the boundless plains of the invisible world employ each of their lives in preparing for the life which is to follow, in securing by a wise exercise of their freedom, industrious culture of their faculties, strict observance of morality, and continuous beneficence, a more noble, more animated, and happier destiny in the new spaces which await them, in the development of their sublime destiny.[4]

Nevertheless, as everything comes to an end in this world, so must everything have an end in the surrounding spheres. After having traversed the successive stages and rested in the successive stations of their journey through the skies, the beings whom we are considering must finally reach a defined place. What is this place, the ultimate term of their immense cycle across the spaces? In our belief, it is the sun.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] On this subject see the book of Dupont de Nemours, "_Philosophie de l'Univers_," quoted by M. Pezzani in his "_Pluralité des existences de l'âme_," pp. 216-218.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

PHYSICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF THE SUN.