328 THE HUMAN FORM. 



But the natural decay and death of the body image those of the 

 mind ; for this it is that, after its culmination, is dying by degrees. 

 The loves which come by nature are gradually extinct as age pro- 

 ceeds: the intelligence also ceases, and the sense. Thus we care 

 much for objects at first, but gradually less, and nothing at last : 

 that care or love is then dead. The child's dolls, and the man's, 

 follow this curricle. So with intelligence: its objects are brightest 

 at first perceiving; in their adult state they are active ideas; after 

 this they become repetitions, and sit in easy chairs of twaddle ; and 

 in the end the mind dies to them, and they to it. And so with the 

 senses also ; the eye has at first much pleasure in seeing, and at last 

 none : the whole of the five are ultimately tired to death. This is 

 the course of nature in the natural or perishable mind for the ob- 

 jects of nature; and the body follows it paribus passibus. For the 

 natural is a feeder to the spiritual mind — the stomach which the 

 soul has for nature; and after a sufficiency of her ways and informa- 

 tions has been assimilated, and the spirit is of age, its old guardian 

 mind and memory are deciduous, and the body drops off with them. 

 The motives of separation between the soul and spiritual mind, and 

 the body and natural mind, are therefore motives of common sense : 

 and are parallel with those for which we cement, or dissever, our 

 connections with our fellow men. For we cannot too often repeat, 

 that the soul is a vast society, and the body a society, and that all 

 our relations and utilities are in their focal union there. 



The materialists are therefore right, when they speak of the death 

 of the mind ; for die it must, or entrance to spiritual life would be 

 impossible. The case is like that of the proper foetal organs, the ductus 

 arteriosus, ductus venosus,* and the like, which unless they died to 



* With regard to apparitions, or physiological re-appearances of the soul in 

 nature (which by a law easily expounded are numerous in proportion as the state 

 of man is low, and exercise a compensatory function for the defect of angelic 

 communion, and faith in revelation), they are according to the analogies of the 

 change from foetal to personal life. For as birth may be incomplete so far as 

 that the bodily changes which it implies have not properly occurred, so death 

 may be imperfect, and the proper spiritual changes may not have ensued; and 

 as " the blue disease" is the oscillation after birth between embryonic and infant 

 life, so haunting is the oscillation between the mundane and supermundane states. 



