'But in that sleep, also, are there no dreams? Are you sure of that? If, in our common sleep, there still subsists an active principle, that feels, speaks, invents, and only by awaking finds that the mind alone, and not the body has been working;--how are you so sure that no such active principle subsists in that sleep which you call eternal? Who has told you what passes where experience is at an end? Who has talked to you of "that bourne whence no traveller returns?" With the cessation, indeed, of warmth; with the stillness of those pulses which beat from circulating blood, all seems to end; but seems it not also to end when we fall into apoplexies? when we faint away? when we appear to be drowned? or when, by any means, life is casually suspended? Yet when those arts, that skill, of which even the success teaches not the principle, even the process discovers not the secret resources, draw back, by means intelligible and visible, but through causes indefinable, the fleeting breath to its corporeal habitation; animation instantly returns, and the soul, with all its powers, revives!' 'Ay, there, there, Albert, is the very point! If the soul were distinct from the body, why should not those who are recovered from drowning, suffocation, or other apparent death, be able to give some account of what passed in those periods when they seemed to be no more? And who has done it? No one, Harleigh! not a single renovated being, has explained away the doubts to which those suspensions of animation give rise.' 'And has any one explained, Elinor, why, though sometimes we have such wonders to relate of the scenes in which we have borne a part in our dreams,--we open our eyes, at other times, with no consciousness whatever, that we have, any way existed from the moment of closing them? The wants of refreshment and recruit of our corporeal machine, we all feel, and know; those of that part which is intellectual,--who is able to calculate? What, except the powers, can be more distinct than the exercises of the mind and of the body? Yet, though we see not the workings of what is intellectual; though they are known only by their effects,--does the student by the midnight oil require less rest from his mental fatigues,--whether he take it or not,--than the ploughman from his corporal labour? Is he not as wearied, as exhausted, after a day consigned to serious and unremitting study and reflection, as the labourer who has spent it in digging, paving, hewing, and sawing? Yet his body has been perfectly at peace; has not moved, has not made the smallest exertion.' 'And why, Harleigh? What is that, but because--'