begging her to shake the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and imprisoned them in the box.
During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the pocket.
The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The Baron was witness.
Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"
"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but going towards it, not coming from it. But this dissimilarity between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude, has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts. This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater distinction between the first and second life than between youth and age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your first difficulty, the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and ears.
"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between both beliefs.
"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity.
"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the ocean? What! man will guess at worlds, when he cannot even guess world-quarters! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek, in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage? Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of its present embodification and humanification?"
"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.
"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied, merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its inhabitants. But we need no other planet."
The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this 'grande tour' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."
"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle will you obtain one?"
"By a repeated one," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an element of the infinite integral whole. The different worlds and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and space is the ocean."
Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon believes itself to be upon the sun."
"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas, the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties, from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be peopled with real sailors."
"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.
"Finer, less solid ones, as e.g. Uranus, only with the most tender beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could even pass into the temperate ones (it would be distillatio per latus), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer human beings[23] like ourselves."
Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued, "against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets, because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least until we have passed all these cornfields."
Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
"There is an
