From “The Destiny of Man.”

BODILY sufferings, pain and sickness, should such befall me, I cannot avoid feeling, for they are incidents of my nature, and I am and remain natural here below. But they shall not trouble me. They affect only the Nature, with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself, the being which is elevated above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so to me. Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed. For myself, the hour of death is the hour of birth to a new and more glorious life.

  Since my heart is thus closed to all desire for the earthly, since, in fact, I have no longer any heart for the perishable, the universe appears to my eye in a transfigured form. The dead, inert mass which but choked up space has vanished; and instead thereof flows, and waves, and rushes the eternal stream of life, and power, and deed;—of the original life, of thy life, O Infinite! For all life is thy life, and only the religious eye pierces to the kingdom of veritable beauty.

  I am related to Thee, and all that I behold around me is related to me. All is quick, all is soul, and gazes upon me with bright spirit-eyes, and speaks in spirit-tones to my heart. Most diversely sundered and severed, I behold, in all the forms without me, myself again, and beam upon myself from them, as the morning sun, in thousand dewdrops diversely refracted, glances toward itself.

  Thy life, as the finite can apprehend it, is a willing which shapes and represents itself by means of itself alone. This life, made sensible in various ways to mortal eyes, flows through me and from me downward, through the immeasurable whole of nature. Here it streams, as self-creating, self-fashioning matter, through my veins and muscles, and deposits its fullness out of me, in the tree, in the plant, in the grass. One connected stream, drop by drop, the forming life flows in all shapes and on all sides, wherever my eye can follow it, and looks upon me, from every point of the universe, with a different aspect, as the same force which fashions my own body in darkness and in secret. Yonder it waves free, and leaps and dances as self-forming motion in the brute; and, in every new body, represents itself as another separate, self-subsisting world;—the same power which, invisible to me, stirs and moves in my own members. All that lives follows this universal attraction, this one principle of all movement, which conducts the harmonious shock from one end of the universe to the other. The brute follows it without freedom. I, from whom, in the visible world, the movement proceeds (without, therefore, originating in me), follow it freely.

  But pure and holy, and near to thine own essence as aught, to mortal apprehension, can be; this thy life flows forth as a band which binds spirits with spirits in one; as air and ether of the one world of Reason, inconceivable and incomprehensible, and yet lying plainly revealed to the spiritual eye. Conducted by this light stream, thought floats unrestrained and the same from soul to soul, and returns purer and transfigured from the kindred breast. Through this mystery the individual finds, and understands, and loves himself only in another; and every spirit detaches itself only from other spirits; and there is no man, but only a Humanity;—no isolated thinking, and loving, and hating, but only a thinking, and loving, and hating in and through one another. Through this mystery the affinity of Spirits, in the invisible world, streams forth into their corporeal nature, and represents itself in two sexes, which, though every spiritual band could be severed, are still constrained, as natural beings, to love each other. It flows forth into the affection of parents and children, of brothers and sisters; as if the souls were sprung from one blood as well as the bodies;—as if the minds were branches and blossoms of the same stem. And from thence it embraces, in narrower or wider circles, the whole sentient world. Even the hatred of spirits is grounded in thirst for love; and no enmity springs up, except from friendship denied.

  Mine eye discerns this eternal life and motion, in all the veins of sensible and spiritual nature, through what seems to others a dead mass. And it sees this life forever ascend and grow, and transfigure itself into a more spiritual expression of its own nature. The universe is no longer to me that circle which returns into itself, that game which repeats itself without ceasing, that monster which devours itself in order to reproduce itself as it was before. It is spiritualized to my contemplation, and bears the peculiar impress of the spirit: continual progress toward perfection, in a straight line which stretches into infinity.

  The sun rises and sets, the stars vanish and return again, and all the spheres hold their cycle dance. But they never return precisely such as they disappear; and in the shining fountains of life there is also life and progress. Every hour which they bring, every morning and every evening sinks down with new blessings on the world. New life and new love drop from the spheres, as dewdrops from the cloud, and embrace nature, as the cool night embraces the earth.

  All death in Nature is birth; and precisely in dying, the sublimation of life appears most conspicuous. There is no death-bringing principle in Nature, for Nature is only life, throughout. Not death kills, but the more living life, which, hidden behind the old, begins and unfolds itself. Death and birth are only the struggle of life with itself to manifest itself in ever more transfigured form, more like itself.

  And my death,—can that be anything different from this? I, who am not a mere representation and copy of life, but who bear within myself the original, the alone true, and essential life? It is not a possible thought that Nature should annihilate a life which did not spring from her; Nature, which exists only for my sake, not I for hers.

  But even my natural life, even this mere representation of an inward invisible life to mortal eyes, Nature cannot annihilate; otherwise she must be able to annihilate herself. She who exists only for me and for my sake, and who ceases to exist, if I am not. Even because she puts me to death she must quicken me anew. It can only be my higher life unfolding itself in her, before which my present life disappears; and that which mortals call death is the visible appearing of a second vivification. Did no rational being, who has once beheld its light, perish from the earth, there would be no reason to expect a new heaven and a new earth. The only possible aim of Nature, that of representing and maintaining Reason, would have been already fulfilled here below, and her circle would be complete. But the act by which she puts to death a free, self-subsisting being is her solemn,—to all Reason apparent,—transcending of that act, and of the entire sphere which she thereby closes. The apparition of death is the conductor by which my spiritual eye passes over to the new life of myself, and of Nature for me.

  Every one of my kind who passes from earthly connections, and who cannot, to my spirit, seem annihilated, because he is one of my kind, draws my thought over with him. He still is, and to him belongs a place.

  While we, here below, sorrow for him with such sorrow as would be felt, if possible, in the dull kingdom of unconsciousness, when a human being withdraws himself from thence to the light of earth’s sun;—while we so mourn, on yonder side there is joy, because a man is born into their world; as we citizens of earth receive with joy our own. When I, sometime, shall follow them, there will be joy for me; for sorrow remains behind in the sphere which I quit.

  It vanishes and sinks before my gaze, the world which I so lately admired. With all the fullness of life, of order, of increase, which I behold in it, it is but the curtain by which an infinitely more perfect world is concealed from me. It is but the germ out of which that infinitely more perfect shall unfold itself. My faith enters behind this curtain, and warms and quickens this germ. It sees nothing definite, but expects more than it can grasp here below, than it will ever be able to grasp in time.

  So I live and so I am; and so I am unchangeable, firm, and complete for all eternity. For this being is not one which I have received from without; it is my own only true being and essence.