relations to certain others,
have brought me by degrees into far too great a dependence on the use
of drugs. And now that, from certain symptoms, I have ground to fear a
change of some kind not so far off--I do not of course mean to-morrow,
or next year, but somewhere nearer than it was this time, I won't say
last year, but say ten years ago--why, then, one begins to think about
things one has been too ready to forget. I suppose, however, if the
will be a natural possession of the human being, and if a man should,
through actions on the tissue of his brain, have ceased to be conscious
of any will, it must return to him the moment he is free from the body,
that is from the dilapidated brain!"

"My lord, I would not have you count too much upon that. We know very
little about these things; but what if the brain give the opportunity
for the action which is to result in freedom? What if there should,
without the brain, be no means of working our liberty? What if we are
here like birds in a cage, with wings, able to fly but not flying about
the cage; and what if, when we are dead, we shall indeed be out of the
cage, but without wings, having never made use of such as we had while
we had them? Think for a moment what we should be without the senses!"

"We shall be able at least to see and hear, else where were the use of
believing in another world?"

"I suspect, my lord, the other world does not need our believing in it
to make a fact of it. But if a man were never to teach his soul to see,
if he were obstinately to close his eyes upon this world, and look at
nothing all the time he was in it, I should be very doubtful whether
the mere fact of going a little more dead, would make him see. The soul
never having learned to see, its sense of seeing, correspondent to and
higher than that of the body, never having been developed, how should
it expand and impower itself by mere deliverance from the one best
schoolmaster to whom it would give no heed? The senses are, I suspect,
only the husks under which are ripening the deeper, keener, better
senses belonging to the next stage of our life; and so, my lord, I
cannot think that, if the will has not been developed through the means
and occasions given in, the mere passing into another condition will
set it free. For freedom is the unclosing of the idea which lies at our
root, and is the vital power of our existence. The rose is the freedom
of the rose tree. I should think, having lo