The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated. Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second." 504th STATION. Flower Toying. Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that, uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson. I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night, the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees, covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides into the beauties of a human face.