English literature -- Scottish authors; Scottish literature
There the Soul and the Will long awaited the Body. The sun was an hour
risen, and had guided a moving multitude of gold and azure waters
against the long reaches of yellow-poppied sand, and to the bases of the
great cliffs, whose schist shone like chrysolite, and whose dreadful
bastions of black basalt loomed in purple shadow, like suspended
thunder-clouds on a windless afternoon.
The air was filled with the poignant sweetness of the loneroid or
bog-myrtle, meadow-sweet, and white wild-roses. The green smell of the
bracken, the delicate woodland odour of the mountain-ash, floated
hitherward and thitherward on the idle breath of the wind, sunwarm when
it came across the sea-pinks and thyme-set grass, cool and fresh when it
eddied from the fern-coverts, or from the heather above the
hillside-boulders where the sheep lay, or from under the pines at the
bend of the sea-road where already the cooing of grey doves made an
indolent sweetness.
The Soul was silent. He had not slept, but, after his playing in the
dark, peace had come to him.
Before dawn he had gone into the room where the Will lay, and had
looked long at his comrade. In sleep the Will more resembled him, as
when awake he the more resembled the Body. A deep pity had come upon the
Soul for him whom he loved so well, but knew so little.
Why was it, he wondered, that he felt less alien from the Body? Why was
it that this strange, potent, inscrutable being, whom both loved, should
be so foreign to each? The Body feared him. As for himself, he, too,
feared him at times. There were moments when all his marvellous
background of the immortal life shrank before the keen gaze of his
friend. Was it possible that Mind could have a life apart from mortal
substances? Was it possible? If so----
It was here that the Will awoke, and smiled at his friend.
He gave no greeting, but answered his thought.
"Yes," he said gravely, and as though continuing an argument, "it is
impossible, if you mean the mortal substance of our brother, the Body.
But yet not without material substance. May it not be that the Mind may
have an undreamed-of shaping power, whereby it can instantly create?"
"Create what?"
"A new environment for its need? Drown it in the deepest gulfs of the
sea, and it will, at the moment it is freed from the body, sheathe
itself in a like shape, and habit itself with free spaces of air, so
that it may breathe, and live, and emerge into the atmosphere, there to
take on a new shape, to involve itself in new circumstances, to live
anew?"
"It is possible. But would that sea-change leave the mind the same or
another?"
"The Mind would come forth one and incorruptible."
"If in truth, the Mind be an indivisible essence?"
"Yes, if the mind be one and indivisible."
"You believe it so?"
"Tell me, are you insubstantial? You, yourself, below this accident of
mortality?"
"I know not what you mean."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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