[Footnote 28: There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is
granted even on this earth; to others, a _limbus patrum_ in which joy
and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief
predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed
of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time,
have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for
immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being.
And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a
tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a
physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to
demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator
cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the
eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is
also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the
wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not
trebled and increased by _anticipation_, _recollection_, and
_sensibility_; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore
tears were only given to human eyes.]
[Footnote 29: Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our
connection with the second world.]
[Footnote 30: 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.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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