The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings. Jean Paul
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we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water, it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it, and that was reward enough.
As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said, playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O, you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously; "the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis, that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the moment when she breaks or kills a rose."
Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked him. Only Karlson pleased him.
At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally continuing progress, i.e. an unceasing duration, must contain and prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."
Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said: "Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the supervision, i.e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues? And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance, a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i.e. eternal, courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still be mortal."
The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated. Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."
Flower Toying.
Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that, uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.
I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night, the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees, covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides into the beauties of a human face.
Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical, paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in silken cradles!
Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve as a body to another soul.
The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us; our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit of the Pyrenees.
Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality. Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent