The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)Figuier, Louis
Religion
The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)
Figuier, Louis
Cosmology; Future life; Transmigration
That these intermediate beings exist, we are certain. They are
invisible to us, but, if we refused to admit the existence of
everything which we cannot see, we should be very easily refuted. Let
a naturalist take a drop of water from a pond, and, shewing it to
an ignorant person, tell him, "this drop of water, in which you do
not see anything, is filled with little animals, and with miniature
plants, which live, are born and die, like the animals and plants,
which inhabit our farms." The ignorant person would probably shrug up
his shoulders, and consider the speaker crazy. But if he were induced
to apply his eye to the magnifier of a microscope, in order to examine
the contents of the drop of water, he must acknowledge that the truth
had been told him; because, in this drop of water, in which he could
at first see nothing, his eye, when assisted by science, would discern
whole worlds.
A great number of living beings can therefore exist where we see
nothing, and it is feasible to science to open the eyes of the
multitude in this respect.
We desire to assume the position of the naturalist of whom we have
spoken. Between man and God, the ignorant crowd and a blind philosophy
perceive nothing; but, when we replace the eyes of the body by those of
the spirit, that is to say, when we make use of reason, analogy, and
education, these mysterious beings come to light.
We have already, in studying the superhuman being, described one
of those intermediate creations between man and the divinity, and
defined the existence of one of those landmarks placed by nature on
the high-road of infinite space. But the ladder does not break off at
its first step, and we are convinced that numerous living hierarchies
intervene between the superhuman being and the radiant throne of the
Almighty. We have said elsewhere, that, in our belief, superhuman
beings are mortal. What becomes of them after their death? Let us now
take up the thread of our deductions.
We believe that--the superhuman being having died at the end of a term
whose duration we have no means of knowing--his soul, perfected by
the exercise of the new faculties which it has received, and the new
senses with which it has been endowed, enters into a new body, provided
with senses still more numerous and more exquisite, and endowed with
faculties of still greater power, and thus commences a fresh existence.
We call the being who succeeds to man _angel_, or superhuman; we
may call his succession in the ethereal realm, _arch-angel_, or
_arch-human_.
The actual moment of the passage from one life to another, must be,
as it is in the case of man, a time of moral and physical pain. The
supreme periods at which a metamorphosis takes place in a sensible
being are crises full of anguish and torment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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