the bodies of men and of animals? We may reply with confidence that
food--that tyrannous obligation of the human and the animal species--is
spared to the inhabitants of the planetary ether. Their bodies must be
supported and refreshed by mere respiration of the fluid in which they
exist.
Let us consider the immense space occupied in the lives of animals by
their need of alimentation. Many animals, especially those which live
in the water, have an incessant need of food. They must eat always,
without intermission, or they die of inanition. Among superior animals,
the necessity for eating and drinking is less imperious, because the
respiratory function comes to their aid, bringing into the body, by the
absorption of oxygen and a small proportion of azote, a certain amount
of reparative element, as a supplement to alimentary substances. Man
profits largely by this advantage. Our respiration is a function of
the highest importance, and it bears a great share in the reparation
of all our organs. The oxygen which our blood borrows from the air
in breathing, contributes largely to our nutrition. The respiratory
function in birds is very active, and the organs which exercise it are
largely developed, and in their nutrition also oxygen counts largely,
and takes the place of a certain quantity of food.
It is our belief that the respiration of the ether in which he lives,
suffices for the support of the material body of the superhuman being,
and that the necessity for eating and drinking has no place in his
existence.
I do not know whether my reader forms an exact conception of the
consequences which would result from the theory, that the superhuman
beings whom we are contemplating are exempted from all need of
food. Those consequences will be most readily comprehended, if we
consider that it is the pressing obligation of procuring food which
renders the lives of animals so miserable. Forced incessantly to seek
their subsistence, animals are entirely given up to this grovelling
occupation; thence come their passions, their quarrels, and their
sufferings. It is much the same in the case of man, though in a less
degree. The necessity for providing for the aliment of every day,
the obligation of earning his daily bread--as the popular phrase has
it--is the great cause of the labours and the sufferings of the human
species. Supposing that man could live, develop himself, and sustain
his life without eating--that the mere respiration of air would supply
the waste of his organs--what a revolution would be effected in human
society. Hateful passions, wars, and rivalries would disappear from the
earth. The golden age, dreamed of by the poets, would be the certain
consequence of such an organic disposition.
This blessing of nature, refused to man, assuredly belongs to the
superhuman being. We may conclude also that the evil passions, which
are a sad attribute of our species, would be unknown in the home of
these privileged creatures. Released from the toil of seeking their
food, living and repairing their functions by the mere effect of
respiration--an involuntary and unconscious act (as the circulation of
the blood and absorption are unconscious acts in men and animals)--the
inhabitants of the ethereal spaces must be able to abandon themselves
exclusively to impressions of unmixed happiness and serenity.
The forces of our body become rapidly exhausted; we cannot exercise our
functions for a certain time without experiencing fatigue. In order to
transport ourselves from one place to another, to carry burthens, to go
up or down any height, to walk, we are obliged to expend these forces,
and lassitude immediately ensues. We cannot exercise the faculty of
thought for more than a certain time. At the end of a short period
attention fails, and thought is suspended. In short, our corporeal
machine, beautifully ordered, is subject to a thousand derangements,
which we call diseases.
From the sense of fatigue, from the continual menace of illness by
organic derangement, the dwellers in the ether are free. Rest is not
for them, as for us, a necessity ensuing on exercise. The body of
the superhuman being, inaccessible to fatigue, does not need repose.
Unembarrassed by the mechanism of a complicated machine, it subsists
and sustains itself by the unaided force of the life which animates it.
Its sole physiological function, probably, is the inhalation of ether,
a function which, it is easy to conceive, may be exercised without
the aid of numerous organs, if we see a whole class of animals--the
Batrachian--for whose respiration the bare and simple skin suffices.
If we admit, that the only function which the superhuman being has
to exercise is that of respiration, the extreme simplicity of his
body will be easily understood. The numerous and complicated organs
and apparatus which exist in the bodies of men and animals, have
for their object the exercise of the functions of nutrition and
reproduction. These functions being suppressed in the creature whom we
are considering, his body must be proportionably lightened. Everything
is reduced to respiration, and the preservation and maintenance of the
faculties of the soul; all is in harmony with those ends. We admire,
with good reason, the wise mechanism of the bodies of men and animals;
but, if human anatomy reveals prodigies in our structure, marvellous
provision in securing the preservation of the individual and his
reproduction, what infinitely greater marvels would, if we were but
permitted to study it, be revealed by the organization of the body of
the superhuman being, in which everything is calculated to secure the
maintenance and the perfection of the soul. With what astonishment
should we learn the use and the purpose of the different parts of that
glorious body, discover the relations of resemblance or of origin
between the living economy of the human, and the living economy of the
superhuman being, and divine the relations which might exist between
the organs of the superhuman being and those which he should assume in
another life, still superior, in which he should be the same being,
again resuscitated in new glory and fuller perfection!
The special organization of the being whom we are describing would
give him the power of transporting himself in a very short space of
time from one place to another, and of traversing great distances
with extraordinary rapidity. We are but simple human beings, and yet
by thought we devour space, and travel, in a twinkling, from one end
of the globe to another; may we not therefore believe that the bodies
of superhuman beings, in whom the spiritual principle is dominant,
are endowed with the privilege of passing from one point in space to
another, with a rapidity which the speed of electricity enables us to
measure?
The superhuman being, who does not require to eat or drink, or rest,
who is always active, and incessantly sensible, has no need of sleep.
Sleep is no more necessary for the reparation of his forces, than
food for their creation. We know that man is deprived of one third of
his existence, by the imperious necessity for sleep. A man who dies
at thirty years of age, has in reality lived for twenty only; he has
slept all the rest of the time! What a poor notion this conveys of the
condition of man! Whence arises this need of sleep? It arises from the
fact that our forces, impaired by their exercise, require inaction
and motionlessness for their repair--this is attained in the kind of
temporary death produced by the suspension of the greater portion of
the vital action, in sleep. During sleep, man prepares and stores up
the forces which he will require to expend during the ensuing period.
He devotes the night to this physical reparation, as much in obedience
to what he observes in all the other portions of creation, as in
obedience to the customs of civilization. But it is probable that all
the forces of the superhuman being are inexhaustible, and that they do
not require sleep, which is one of the hardest conditions of human
existence. Everything leads us to believe that perpetual wakefulness is
the permanent state of the superhuman being, and that the word "sleep"
would have no meaning for him.
Darkness must be equally unknown to all those beings who float in the
ethereal spaces. Our night and day are produced alternatively by the
rotation of the earth upon her axis, a rotation which hides the sun
from her view during one half of her revolution. This rotatory motion
draws our atmosphere with it, but its influence extends no further, the
ether which surmounts our atmosphere is not subject to it. That fluid
mass remains motionless, while the earth and its atmosphere turn upon
their axis. The superhuman beings, who, according to our ideas, inhabit
the planetary ether, are not drawn into this motion. They behold the
earth revolving beneath them, but, being placed outside its movements,
they never lose sight of the radiant sun-star.
Night, we repeat, is an accidental phenomenon, which belongs to the
planets only, because they have a hemisphere now illumined, and then
not illumined by the sun; but night is unknown to the remainder of the
universe. The superhuman beings, who people the regions far above the
planets, never lose sight of the sun, and their happy days pass in the
midst of an ocean of light.
Let us pass on to the consideration of the senses which these
superhuman beings probably possess, premising:
1. That the superhuman being must be endowed with the same senses
which we possess, but that those senses are infinitely more acute and
exquisite than ours.
2. That he must possess special senses, unknown to us.
What are the new senses enjoyed by the superhuman being? It would be
impossible to return a satisfactory reply to this question. We have no
knowledge of any other senses than those with which we ourselves are
endowed, and no amount of genius could enable any man to divine the
object of a sense denied to him by nature. Try to give a man born blind
an idea of the colour, red; and he will answer: "Yes, I understand!
It is piercing, like the sound of a trumpet!" Try to give a man born
deaf an idea of the sound of the harp, and he will answer: "Yes! It
is gentle and tender, like the green grass of the fields!" Let us
renounce, once for all, any attempt to define the senses with which
nature endows the beings who people the ethereal plains; these senses
belong to objects and ideas the mere notion of which is forbidden to us.
There is a well-known story of a man born blind, upon whom the famous
surgeon Childesen operated. Having recovered his sight, the patient
was a long time learning the use of his eyes; he was obliged to
educate those organs, step by step, and by slow degrees to form his
intelligence. Equally well known is Condillac's beautiful fiction,
in which he imagines a man born into the world without the senses
of sight, speech, and hearing, and who is, therefore, destitute of
ideas. By degrees, he is endowed with each of these senses, and the
philosopher thus composes, bit by bit, a soul which feels, and a mind
which thinks. This philosophical idea has been greatly admired. Like
the man-statue of Condillac, we are only, while here below, imperfect
statues, endowed with but a small number of senses. When, however,
we shall have reached the superior regions destined to our ennobled
condition, we shall be put in possession of new senses, such as our
reason dimly perceives, and our hearts long for.
We cannot, as we have previously said, divine what the new senses
which shall be granted to the superhuman being are to be, because they
belong to objects and ideas of which we are ignorant, and to forms
which are exclusively proper to worlds at present hidden from our eyes.
The kingdom of the planetary ether has its geography, its powers, its
passions, and its laws; and the new senses of men, resuscitated to that
glorious existence, will be exercised upon those objects.
The only thing which we can safely prognosticate is that all the senses
which we now possess will then exist in their full perfection--sight,
hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is allowable to deduce this
process of future perfection by reasoning from the extraordinary
development of certain senses in the case of animals.
The sense of smell is developed in the hunting dog to a degree which
surpasses our imagination. How can we understand this quite ordinary
fact, that the dog perceives the scent which has emanated from a hare
or a partridge which has passed by the place at which he is smelling
many hours previously, and is now several leagues away! The perfection
of sight in the eagle and other birds of prey astonishes us equally.
These birds, floating at an immense height, see their prey upon the
earth, creatures much smaller than themselves, and descend upon them
without deviating from the perpendicular line of their flight. The
bat, accidentally deprived of sight, supplies this deficiency so
well by the sense of touch, by means of his membranous wings, that
he guides himself through the air, and finds his way to the interior
of human dwellings, as unerringly as if he had the full use of his
eyesight. To such a degree of exquisite sensibility has the sense of
hearing attained among native Indian tribes, that a man, laying his ear
against the earth, will detect the tread of an enemy at the distance
of a league. Among musicians, also, how must the sense of hearing be
cultivated by a man, who, partly by a natural gift, and partly by
practice, comes to be able to detect the most minute difference in
the tone of one instrument among fifty different kinds, all played at
once, in an orchestra. Supposing that the senses of the superhuman
being should have acquired the degree of extraordinary activity which
is common to animals, and, in certain cases, to man, we can form some
estimate of the power and extent of such a sensorial system.
We can also arrive at some idea of the perfection of the senses
attained by resuscitated man, by considering the accession of power
which our own senses may receive by the assistance of science and art.
Before the invention of the microscope, no one ever imagined that the
eye could penetrate the mysteries of that world in miniature well named
the _Infinitely Little_, until then absolutely unknown; no one had
ever divined, for instance, that in one drop of water might be seen
myriads of living beings. These beings have existed throughout all
time, but man has been able to contemplate them for only two centuries.
Our visual power over microscopic beings was until then unknown. The
least enlightened, the most careless student of this day, regards with
indifference things which Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galienus,
Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon could not have contemplated, or even
suspected to exist. The discovery of the telescope, in the days of
Kepler and Galileo, hurled back the boundaries of the human intellect
and threw open to its investigation a domain hitherto sealed from its
sight. There, where Hipparchus and Ptolemy had seen nothing, Galileo,
Huyghens, Kepler, made, in a few nights, by the aid of the telescope,
discoveries of hitherto unsuspected celestial splendour. The satellites
of Jupiter and Saturn, a multitude of new stars, the phases of Venus,
and, at a later period, the discovery of new planets only to be seen by
the telescope, the observation of spots on the sun, and the revolution
of the nebulæ into collections of stars, were the almost immediate
consequences of the invention of the telescope. Thus we learned that,
by the aid of art, the human eye can penetrate the most distant regions
of heaven.
Let us now suppose all the powers of the telescope and all those of the
microscope concentrated in the sense of vision; that is to say, that in
addition to all objects placed at ordinary distances, it can discern
all microscopic objects, and at the same time all the celestial bodies
invisible to the naked eye, and you will have an idea of what the
sense of sight is, in the superhuman being.
There is no occasion to dwell upon the extraordinary proportions which
our accumulated knowledge would assume, if our sight could enjoy those
extraordinary powers of extension, if it could perform simultaneously
the functions of the telescope and the microscope. Science would
march forward with the tread of a giant. What enormous progress would
be made by chemistry if our eyes could penetrate into the interior
of all bodies, beholding their molecules, estimating their relative
volume, their arrangement, and the form and colour of their atoms. A
glance would reveal to us secrets of chemical solutions such as the
genius of a Lavoisier could not penetrate. Physics would contain no
further mysteries for us, for we should know, by simply using our eyes,
everything which we are now painfully striving to divine by reason, and
by the aid of difficult and uncertain experiments. We should _see_ why
and how bodies are warmed and acquire electricity. We should have the
explanation of the mathematical laws in obedience to which the physical
forces, light, heat, and magnetism are exercised. Our eyes would
suffice for the solution of those physical and mechanical problems
before which the genius of such men as Newton, Malus, Ampère, and
Gay-Lussac stands still.
We do not doubt that the superhuman being is endowed with sight thus
marvellously perfect.
We might carry this argument out in detail, applying it to all the
other senses, but enough has been said to illustrate the exaltation
and perfecting of those senses which man possesses only in their
rudiments, in the favoured dwellers in a superior sphere. We will only
add, that the result of such a degree of perfection of the senses is,
that the superhuman being can move with a rapidity, of which light
and electricity only can give us some notion, that is to say, that
these perfected senses can be used at great distances, and with great
promptitude. If the entire body of the superhuman being can transport
itself with wonderful rapidity from one place to another, as we have
already admitted, his senses can also act from, and at great distances.
We do not think we can err in comparing the actions of the dwellers in
the invisible world which we presume to investigate, with the phenomena
of light and electricity.
Does sex exist in the superhuman being? Assuredly not. The Christian
religion defines its absence in the angel. The angel of the Christian
creeds has the features of either man or woman, the mild face of
a youth, or the pathetic beauty of a girl. Sex is suppressed, the
individual is androgynous. Thus, too, it must be in the case of the
superhuman being. The reciprocal affection which reigns among the
blessed dwellers in the ether does not require diversity of sex.
The affections undergo a purifying process, according as they are
elevated, from those of the animals to those of man. The animals have
but little of the sentiment of friendship. Love, with its material
impulses, is almost all they know. The sentiments of affection
possessed by animals, apart from their carnal instincts, reduce
themselves to those of maternity, which are strong and sincere, but
of short duration. Their young are the objects of attentive care and
caresses while their helplessness demands such aid, but as soon as they
can live on their own resources they are abandoned by the mothers, who
no longer even recognize them. There is no constant, lasting affection
in animals, except the sentiment of love, which is caused by their
sexual necessities. The sentiments of affection entertained by man are
numerous, and frequently noble and pure. We love our mothers and our
sons as long as our hearts beat in our breasts. We love our brothers,
our sisters, and our relations with a sentiment in which there is
nothing carnal, and which is deeply rooted in the soul. If love is
often inseparably attached to physical desires, it can, nevertheless,
shake itself free from them, and a disinterested friendship frequently
survives the extinction of sensual feeling. In this respect we are
far superior to the animals. Let us go a step further, even to the
supernatural being, the next link in the chain to ourselves, and we
shall find the sentiment of affection entirely detached from the
consideration of sex. In that sublime and blessed realm which they
inhabit, superhuman beings are all of the same organic type. They need
not, in order to love one another, to belong to two opposite sexes, or
different groups of organization: their tenderness is the result of the
serenity of the infinite purity of souls, of the sympathy evoked by
common perfections.
On the other hand, the ethereal region which awaits us is the scene of
the reunion of those who have loved one another in this world. There
the father will find the son, and the mother will rejoin the daughter,
torn from each by death, there husbands and wives will meet, and the
separation of friends come to an end. But, under their new form, in the
perfected body wherein their regenerated souls shall dwell, there is
no more sex, and love is for all an ideal, noble, and exquisitely pure
sentiment.
How blind and self-interested is love here below! How narrow and
egotistical a sentiment is friendship. It cannot enlarge itself without
pain and difficulty, to embrace the totality of the human kind. Why
is it so hard for it to lift itself up to the sublime Creator of the
worlds? Why do we not love God as we love our neighbours? In the
upper world it will be far otherwise. Our faculty of loving, limited
here by fleshly bonds, will be set free there, from every sensual
restraint. Man, resuscitated to glory, will love his wife as he loves
his children, his friends, and his brethren. His affections will never
more be degraded by his senses. The happiness which this purified
sentiment, constantly received from ever living sources, will afford
him, will suffice to fill and satisfy his soul. His power of loving
will be extended to all nature, it will be spread abroad over the most
elevated spheres; his soul will be exalted by the sublime sensations of
this universal love, this wide sympathy with the whole creation. True
charity, comprehending the entire universe, will burn in all hearts.
The love of God will rule over all these multiplied affections, from
the height of His infinite power, and the fervour of our sentiments
of love for our kind will be crowned by our sublime adoration of the
Creator of all.
But, it will be said, if superhuman beings are of no sex, how
are they to be reproduced, how is the species to be kept up, and
multiplied? There will be no need of reproduction, the species of the
superhuman being will not require to be maintained, or multiplied.
The reproduction, the preservation of his species is the business of
the inhabitants of the inferior worlds, of the earth and the planets.
Such is their lot, such the task imposed upon them by nature. But
reproduction is unknown and unnecessary to the fortunate beings who
dwell in the planetary ether. From the earth and the other planets
fresh and ever fresh phalanxes are despatched to them. The battalions
of the elect are recruited by arrivals from the lower worlds. Below
is the multiplication of individuals; above is the sojourn of blessed
beings, who have no need of maintaining their species, because the laws
of their destiny differ from those which rule the lot of terrestrial
man. Reproduction is the task of inferior worlds, permanence is the
inheritance of the world above.