The body of him who dies, as we say, 'by efflux of time' at the age of fifty is as perfect as it was at five-and twenty.[1] Yet few men live to be fifty-five,[2] and most have ceased to take much interest in practical life, or even in science, by forty-five."[3]
"That seems strange," I said. "If no foreign body gets into the machinery, and the machinery itself does not wear out, it is difficult to understand why the clock should cease to go."
"Would not some of your race," he asked, "explain the mystery by suggesting that the human frame is not a clock, but contains, and owes its life to, an essence beyond the reach of the scalpel, the microscope, and the laboratory?"
"They hold that it is so. But then it is not the soul but the body that is worn out in seventy or eighty of the Earth's revolutions."
"Ay," he said; "but if man were such a duplex being, it might be that the wearing out of the body was necessary, and had been adapted to release the soul when it had completed its appropriate term of service in the flesh."
I could not answer this question, and he did not pursue the theme. Presently I inquired, "If you allow no appeal to popular feeling or passion, to what was I so nearly the victim? And what is the terrorism that makes it dangerous to avow a credulity or incredulity opposed to received opinion?"
