'Hasten not, Elinor, thence, to your favourite conclusion, that soul and body, if wearied or rested together, are, therefore, one and the same thing: observation, and reflection, turned to other points of view, will shew you fresh reasons, and objects, every day, to disprove that identity: shew you, on one side, corporal force for supporting the bitterest grief of heart, with uninjured health; and, mental force, on the other side, for bearing the acutest bodily disorders with unimpaired intellectual vigour. How often do the most fragile machines, enwrap the stoutest minds? how often do the halest frames, encircle the feeblest intellects? All proves that the connexion between mind and body, however intimate, is not blended;--though where its limits begin, or where they end,--who can tell? But, who, also I repeat, can explain the phenomenon, by which, in the dead of the night, when we are completely insulated, and left in utter darkness, we firmly believe, nay, feel ourselves shone upon by the broad beams of day; and surrounded by society, with which we act, think, and reciprocate ideas?' 'Dreams, I must own, Albert, are strangely incomprehensible. How bodies can seem to appear, and voices to be heard, where all around is empty space, it is not easy to conceive!' 'Let this insolvable, and acknowledged difficulty, then, Elinor, in a circumstance which, though daily recurring, remains inexplicable, check any hardy decision of the cause why, after certain suspensions, the soul may resume its functions to our evident knowledge; yet why we can neither ascertain its departure, its continuance, nor its return, after others. Oh Elinor! mock not, but revere the impenetrable mystery of eternity! Ignorance is here our lot; presumption is our most useless infirmity. The mind and body after death must either be separate, or together. If together, as you assert, there is no proof attainable, that the soul partakes not of all the changes, all the dispersions, all the sufferings, and all the poor enjoyments, of what to us seems the lifeless, but which, in that case, is only the speechless carcase: if separate, as I believe,--whither goest thou, Oh soul! to what regions of bliss?--or what abysses of woe?' 'Harleigh, you electrify me! you convulse the whole train of my principles, my systems, my long cherished conviction!'