VI.
ETERNAL PROGRESS.
Days, weeks, months, seasons, years, pass quickly on this planet,--anddoubtless also on the others. The Earth has already run its yearlycourse around the Sun twenty times since destiny so tragically closedthe book that my young friends had been reading for less than a year.Their happiness was short-lived; their morning faded away like thedawn.
I had forgotten,[1] or at least lost sight of them, when quite recently,at a hypnotic seance in Nancy, where I had stopped for a few days on myway to the Vosges, I was induced to question a "subject" by whoseassistance the experimental savants of the Academie Stanislas hadobtained some of those really startling results with which thescientific Press has surprised us for a few years past. I do notremember how, but it happened that my conversation with him turned onthe planet Mars. After describing to me a country situated on the shoresof a sea known to astronomers under the name of Kepler's Ocean, and asolitary island lying in the bosom of this sea; after telling me aboutthe picturesque landscapes and reddish vegetation which adorned theshores, the wave-washed cliffs, and the sandy beaches where the billowsbreak and die away,--the subject, who was very sensitive, suddenly grewpale, and raised his hand to his head; his eyes closed, his eyebrowscontracted; he seemed desirous of grasping some fugitive idea whichobstinately eluded him. "_See!_" said Dr. B., standing before him withirresistible command; "see! I wish it."
"You have friends there," he said to me.
"I am not surprised at that," I said, laughing; "I have done enough todeserve them."
"Two friends," he went on, "who are talking about you now, this veryminute."
"Ah, ha! Persons who know me?"
"Yes."
"How is that?"
"They have known you here."
"Here?"
"Here,--on the earth!"
"How long ago was it?"
"I do not know."
"Have they lived on Mars long?"
"I do not know."
"Are they young?"
"Yes; they are lovers, who adore each other."
Then the loved image of my lamented friends rose distinctly in my mind;but I had no sooner seen them than the subject exclaimed,--
"Yes! it is they!"
"How do you know?"
"I see,--they are the same souls, same colors."
"What do you mean by the 'same colors'?"
"Yes, the souls are suffused with light."
A few instants afterwards he added, "And yet there is a difference."
Then he was silent, his forehead frowning in his effort to find out. Buthis face regained all its calmness and serenity as he added,--
"He has become she, the woman; she is now the man,--and they love eachother more than ever."
As if he did not quite understand what he had said himself, he seemed tobe seeking for some explanation,--made painful efforts, judging from thecontraction of the muscles in his face, and fell into a sort ofcataleptic fit, from which Dr. B. speedily relieved him; but the lucidinterval had fled, not to return.
In ending, I leave this last fact with the reader just as it happened,without comment. Had the subject, according to the hypothesis nowadmitted by many hypnotists, been under the influence of my own thoughtwhen the professor ordered him to answer me? Or, being independent, hadhe really "freed" himself, and had he _seen_ beyond our sphere? I cannotundertake to decide. Perhaps it will appear in the course of this story.
And yet I will acknowledge in all sincerity that the resurrection of myfriend and his adored companion on the world of Mars,--a neighboringabode to ours, and so remarkably like this one we inhabit, only older,doubtless more advanced on the road of progress,--may appear to athinker's eyes the logical and natural continuation of their earthlyexistence, so quickly broken off.
Doubtless Spero was right in declaring that matter is not what it seemsto be, and that appearances are deceitful; that the real is theinvisible; that animate force is indestructible; that in the absolute,the infinitely great is identical with the infinitely small; thatcelestial space is not impassable; and that souls are the seeds ofplanetary humanities. Who knows but that the philosophy of dynamism mayone day reveal the religion of the future to the apostles of astronomy?Does not Urania bear the torch without which every problem is insoluble,without which all Nature would remain to us in impenetrable obscurity?Heaven must explain the earth, the infinite must explain the soul andits immaterial faculties.
The unknown of to-day is the truth of to-morrow.
The following pages will perhaps enable us to form something of an ideaof the mysterious link which binds the transitory to the eternal, thevisible to the invisible, earth to heaven.
Part Third.
HEAVEN AND EARTH.
Uranie. English Page 11
