Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/80

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CAMPANER THAL.

the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,—annihilation?^[1] And as, from the same cause, the souls of all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely even for the last one which can never exist.^[2] And you take for granted all these enigmas and

↑ The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other, and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course, considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.
↑ Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he, e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition 884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands immortality.

[1] The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other, and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course, considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.

[2] Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he, e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition 884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands immortality.

[1]

[2]