Natur, abschn. iv. kap. ii. sect. 5,
6.

38 Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des
Erdenlebens.

"Death gives to life all its relish, as hunger is the true sauce
of food. Death first makes us precious and dear to ourselves.
Since it lies in the nature of change that no condition is
endless, but morning ever follows night, death cannot be endless.
Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain of
dust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thou
art, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? O
pusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thy
weak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious that
thou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every night
thou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, and
shalt be. The loss of consciousness is not necessarily the loss of
self. The knowledge of my being is not my being itself, but a
peculiar force thereof, which, entering into reciprocal action
with other forces, is subject to change. It is its essence to act,
and thus to change, yet without surrendering its essence. Goethe's
words may be applied to the soul: 'It is; therefore eternally it
is.'

Not in cold motionlessness consists eternal life, but in eternal
movement, in eternal alteration, in incessant change. These are
warranties that no state endures forever, not even the
unconscious, death." 39

In this unfolding of the theory there are many arbitrary and
fanciful conceptions which may easily be dispensed with. The
interspersion of the bright life of the human monads with blank
epochs of oblivious darkness, and the confinement of their destiny
to an endless repetition of their life course on this globe, are
not necessary. In the will of God the free range of the boundless
universe may lie open to them and an incessant career in forever
novel circumstances await them. It is also conceivable that human
souls, leading still recurrent lives on earth with total
forgetfulness, may at last acquire sufficient power, in some happy
concurrence or sublime exigency, to summon back and retain all
their foregone states. But, leaving aside all such incidental
speculations, the chief interest of the dynamic atomistic or monad
theory, as affording a solid basis for immortality, is in relation
to the arrogance of a shallow and conceited materialism. Says the
materialist, "Show me a spirit, and I will believe in your
heaven." Repli