ed. Perhaps we can tell you, by-and-by, how this antagonism commences; at present, you would scarcely be able to comprehend it clearly."
This I felt, for I was already getting confused with the questions that occurred to me as to the relations between spirit and matter.
I asked once more, "Have you never been personal, as I am?—have you never had a body and a name?"
"Perhaps," was the reply,—"but it must have been long since; and the trifling circumstances which you call life, with all their direct and recognizable effects, pass away so soon, that it is impossible to recall anything of it. There seems a kind of consciousness when we have something to act against, as against your mind at the present moment; but as to name, and all that kind of distinctiveness, what is the use of it where there is no possibility of confusion or mistake as to identity? We have said that we are spirit; and when we say that spirit is one and matter one, we have gone behind personal identity."
"But," asked I, "am I to lose my individual existence,—to become finally merged in a universal impersonality? What, then, is the object of life?"
"You see the plants and animals all around you growing up and passing away,—each entering its little orbit, and sweeping through this sphere of cognizance back again to the same mystery it emerged from; you never ask the question as to them, but for yourself you are anxious. If you had not been, would creation have been any less creation?—if you cease, will it not still be as great? Truly, though, your mistake is one of too little, not of too much. You assume that the animals become nothing; but, truly, nothing dies. The very crystals into which all the so-called primitive substances are formed, and which are the first forms of organization, have a spirit in them; for they obey something which inhabits and organizes them. If you could decompose the crystal, would you annihilate the soul which organized it? The plant absorbs the crystal, and it becomes a part of a higher organization, which could no more exist without its soul; and if the plant is cut down and cast into the oven, is the organic impulse food for the flames? You, the animal, do but exist through the absorption of these vegetable substances, and why should you not obey the analogical law of absorption and aggregation? You killed a deer to-day;—the flesh you will appropriate to supply the wants of your own material organization; but the life, the spirit which made that flesh a deer, in obedience to which that shell of external appearance is moulded,—you missed that. You can trace the body in its metamorphoses; but for this impalpable, active, and only real part of the being,—it were folly to suppose it more perishable, more evanescent, than the matter of which it was master. And why should not you, as well as the deer, go back into the great Life from which you came? As to a purpose in creation, why should there be any other than that which existence always shows,—that of existing?"
I now began to notice that all the leading ideas which the dæmon offered were put in the form of questions, as if from a cautious non-committalism, or as if it dared not in so many words say that they were the absolute truth. I felt that there was another side to the matter, and was confident that I should detect the sophistry of the dæmon; but then I did not feel able to carry the conversation farther, and was sensible of a readiness on the part of my interlocutor to cease. I wondered at this, and if it implied weariness on its part, when it was replied,—"We answer to your own mind; of course, when that ceases to act, there ceases to be reaction." I cried out in my own mind, in utter bewilderment,—"Objective or subjective?" and ceased my questionings.
The camp-fire glowed splendidly through the overhanging branches and foliage, and I longed for a revel of light. I asked the guides to make a "blaze," and, after a minute's delay and an ejaculation of
