62 LIFE: ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE 
Eater” has proposed an answer to this puzzling 
question. He says: 
“That spirit should ever lose the traces of a 
single impression is impossible. DeQuincy’s 
comparison of it to the Palimpsest manuscripts, 
which is one of the most powerful that even 
that great genius could have conceived, is not 
at all too much so to express the truth. We 
pass, in dreamy musing, through a grassy field; 
a blade of the tender herbage brushes against 
the foot; its impression hardly comes into con¬ 
sciousness; on earth it is never remembered 
again. But not even that slight sensation is 
utterly lost. The pressure of the body dulls 
the soul to its perception, other external influ¬ 
ences supplant it; but when the time of the 
final awakening comes, the resurrection of the 
soul from its charnel in the body, the analytic 
finger of inevitable light shall search out that 
old inscription, and to the spiritual eye no deep 
graven record of its earthly triumphs shall be 
clearer. 
“The benumbing influences of the body pro¬ 
tect us here from much of remorse and retros¬ 
pective pining. Its weight lies heavily upon 
the inner sense, and deadens it to perception of 
multitudes of characters which, to be read, 
require acutest powers of discernment. When 
the body is removed, the barrier of the Past 
goes also. 
“This fact may perhaps be one of the final 
causes, why the body exists at all. Why are we 
not born directly into the spiritual world, with¬ 
out having to pass through a weary preliminary 
experience, hemmed in by the gross corporeal 
