'What is it Elinor means?' cried Harleigh, alarmed, yet affecting to speak lightly: 'Has she no compunction for the labour she causes my blood in thus perpetually accelerating its circulation.'
'Pardon me, dear Harleigh, I have inadvertently run from my purpose to my wishes. To the point, then. Make me, if it be possible, conceive how your reason has thus been played upon, and your discernment been set asleep. I have studied this matter abroad, with the ablest casuists, I have met with; and though I may not retain, or detail their reasoning, well enough to make a convert of any other, they have fixed for ever in my own mind, a conviction that death and annihilation are one. Why do you knit your brow? – And see how Ellis starts! – And why do you both look at me as if I were mad? Mad? because I would rather crush misery than endure it? Mad? because I would rather, at my own time, die the death of reason, than by compulsion, and when least disposed, that of nature? Of reason, that appreciates life but by enjoyment; not of nature, that would make misery linger, till malady or old age dissolve the worn out fabric. To indulge our little miserable fears and propensities, we give flattering epithets to all our meannesses; for what is endurance of worldly pain and affliction but folly? what patience, but insipidity? what suffering, but cowardice? Oh suicide! triumphant antidote to woe! straight forward, unerring route to rest, to repose! I call upon thy aid! I invoke – '
'Repose? – rest?' interrupted Harleigh, 'how earned? By deserting our duties? By quitting our posts? By forsaking and wounding all by whom we are cherished?'
'One word, Harleigh, answers all that: Did we ask for our being? Why was it given us if doomed to be wretched? To whom are we accountable for renouncing a donation, made without our consent or knowledge? O, if ever that wretched thing called life has a noble moment, it must surely be that of its voluntary sacrifice! lopping off, at a blow, that hydra-headed monster of evil upon evil, called time; bounding over the imps of superstition; dancing upon the pangs of disease; and boldly, hardily mocking the senseless legends, that would frighten us with eternity! – Eternity? to poor, little, frail, finite beings like us! Oh Albert! worldly considerations, monkish inventions, and superstitious reveries set apart; – reason called forth, truth developed, probabilities canvassed, – say! is it not clear that death is an end to all? an abyss eternal? a conclusion? Nature comes but for succession; though the pride of man would give her resurrection. Mouldering all together we go, to form new earth for burying our successors.'
'Horrible, Elinor, most horrible! yet if, indeed, it is your opinion that you are doomed to sink to nothing; if your soul, in the full tide of its energies, and in the pride of intellect, seems to you a mere appendant to the body; if you believe it to be of the same fragile materials; how can you wish to shorten the so short period of consciousness? to abridge the so brief moment of sensibility? Is it not always time enough to think, feel, see, hear, – love and be loved no more?'
'Yes! 'tis always too soon to lose happiness; but misery, – ah Albert! – why should misery, when it can so easily be stilled, be endured?'
'Stilled, Elinor? – What mean you? By annihilation? – How an infidel assumes fortitude to wish for death, is my constant astonishment! To believe in the eternal loss of all he holds, or knows, or feels; to be persuaded that "this sensible, warm being" will "melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew," – and to believe that there all ends! Surely every species of existence must be preferable to such an expectation from its cessation! Dust! literal dust! – Food for worms! – to be trod upon; – crushed; – dug up; – battered down; – is that our termination? That, – and nothing more?'
'Tis shocking, Albert, no doubt; shocking and disgusting. Yet why disguise the fact? Reason, philosophy, analogy, all prove our materialism. Even common observation, even daily experience, in viewing our natural end, where neither sickness nor accident impede, nor shorten its progress, prove it by superannuation; shew clearly that mind and body, when they die the long death of nature, gradually decline together.'
'Were that double decay constant, Elinor, in its junction, you might thence, perhaps, draw that inference; but does not the body wither as completely by decay, in the very prime, and pride, and bloom of youth, where the death is consumption, as in the most worn-out decrepitude of age? Yet the capacity is often, even to the last minute, as perfect as in the vigour of health. Were all within, as well as all without, material, would not the blight to one involve, uniformly, the blight to the other? How often, too, does age, even the oldest, escape any previous decay of intellect! There are records extant, of those who, after attaining their hundredth year, have been capable of bearing testimony in trials; but are there any of those, who, at half that age, have preserved their external appearance? No. It is the body, therefore, not the soul, that, in a natural state, and free from the accelerations of accident, seems first to degenerate. The grace of symmetry, the charm of expression, may last with our existence, and delight to its latest date; but that which we understand exclusively, as personal perfections, – how soon is it over! Not only before the intellects are impaired, but even, and not rarely, before they are arrived at their full completion. Can mind, then, and body be but one and the same thing, when they neither flourish nor wither together?'
'Ah, Harleigh! is it not your willing mind, that here frames its sentiments from its exaltation? Not your deeper understanding, that defines your future expectations from your rational belief?'
'No, Elinor; my belief in the immortality of the soul may be strengthened, but it is not framed by my wishes. Let me, however, ask you a question in return. Your disbelief of the immortality of the soul, is founded on your inability to have it, visually, or orally, demonstrated: Let me, then, ask, can the nature, use, and destinations of the soul, however darkly hidden from our analysing powers, be more impervious to our limited foresight, than the narrower, yet equally, to us, invisible, destiny of our days to come upon earth? But does any one, therefore, from not knowing its purposes, disbelieve that his life may be lengthened? Yet which of us can divine what his fate will be from year to year? What his actions, from hour to hour? his thoughts, from moment to moment?'
'Oh Harleigh! how fatally is that true! how little did I foresee, when I so delighted in your society, that that very delight would but impel me to burn for the moment of bidding you an eternal farewell!'
Harleigh sighed; but with earnestness continued: 'We conceive the soul to influence, if not to direct our whole construction, yet we have no sensible proof of its being in any part of it: how, then, shall we determine that to be destroyed or departed, which we have never known to be created? never seen to exist? O bow we down! for all is inexplicable! We can but say, the body is obvious in its perfection, and still obvious in its decay; the soul is always unsearchable! were we sure it were only our understanding, we might, perhaps, develop it; or only our feelings, we might catch it; but it is something indefinable, of which the consciousness tells us not the qualities, nor the possession the attributes; and of which the end leaves no trace! We follow it not to its dissolution like the body; which, after what we call death, is still as evident, as when our conception of what is soul were yet lent to it: if the soul, then, be equally material, say, is it still there also? though as unseen and hidden as when breath and motion were yet perceptible?'