s an Unsterblichkeit und
Wiedersehen uber jeden Zweifel. Oporinus, Historia Critica
Doctrina de Immortalitate Mortalium.

2 Muller, Elements of Physiology, book vi. sect. i. ch. 1.

lips, the light of love beamed in that eye. One shuddering sigh,
and how cold, vacant, forceless, dead, lies the heap of clay! It
is impossible to prevent the conviction that an invisible power
has been liberated; that the flight of an animating principle has
produced this awful change. Why may not that untraceable something
which has gone still exist? Its vanishing from our sensible
cognizance is no proof of its perishing. Not a shadow of genuine
evidence has ever been afforded that the real life powers of any
creature are destroyed.3 In the absence of that proof, a multitude
of considerations urge us to infer the contrary. Surely there is
room enough for the contrary to be true; for, as Jacobi profoundly
observes, "life is not a form of body; but body is one form of
life." Therefore the soul which now exists in this form, not
appearing to be destroyed on its departure hence, must be supposed
to live hereafter in some other form.4

A second series of observations and reflections, gathered from
partial similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make
the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in
the literature of many nations, a standard illustration of the
thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture
has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the
butterfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is
but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and
stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit
emerges from its cast off cocoon and broken cell into the more
ethereal air and sunnier light of a higher world's eternal day.
The emblematic correspondence is striking, and the inference is
obvious and beautiful. Nor is the change, the gain in endowments
and privileges, greater in the supposed case of man than it is
from the slow and loathsome worm on the leaf to the swift and
glittering insect in the air.

Secondly, in the material world, so far as we can judge, nothing
is ever absolutely destroyed. There is no such thing as
annihilation. Things are changed, transformations abound; but
essences do not cease to be. Take a given quantity of any kind of
matter; divide and subdivide it in ten thousand ways, by
mechanical violence,