Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--" "Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude, has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts. This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater distinction between the first and second life than between youth and age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty, the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and ears. "On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between both beliefs. "As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania, Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness. Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented humanity.