dicate him from the ill savour which some of his admiring and patronizing friends, both here and abroad, threaten to bring upon his name; and we shall now adduce, in further confirmation of the view which we have taken of our author, in counting him among the champions of the inner soul's holy faith and hope, against the cold and base unbelief of the carnal mind, a few passages from his "Selina." This work was, as" we have already stated, commenced by him on the day when he received the intelligence of his son's death; it was intended to complete the argument of the "Kampaner Thal," of which it is, both in form and substance, a continuation. The miserable theory which denies the immortality of the soul and the continuance of individual existence after death, designated by the expressive term "Vernichtungsglaube," i.e. belief in annihilation, is assailed and demolished by Jean Paul with arguments of singular depth, boldness, and power. His heart boils with indignation at the blasphemy of that theory; he challenges its advocates to pluck up their courage, to draw near and look down into the yawning gulf beneath them :—
" Many errors appear, like the moon, at a distance mild and soft; but on a nearer approach they show, like the moon through the telescope, precipices and volcanoes. Come closer, then, to the belief in the mortality of the soul, and look down into its chasms and craters.
" Realize, for once, the thought that we are all mere sound-figures of fine sand, which a note draws together on the vibrating glass, and which afterwards a breath of air without any sound blows off from the glass into empty space; and the existence of nations and centuries is not worth the expenditure of trouble and of life. They are formed and buried, raised up and thrown down again; but what use is it, that by careful nurture herbs are made to grow in the place of weeds, and blossoms to succeed the leaves? The churchyard lies upon the ploughed-down nations; the present is nothing to the past, the future nothing to the present. Sciences rise for ever; and for ever the heads which contained them, sink and grow hollow and empty down below. Let, at length, any one people attain the highest degree of science, of art, and of moral culture, in which later nations outstrip their predecessors, let in the last age the spiritual harvest and abundance accumulated through successive centuries be deposited in the human multitude of sound-figures: within fifty years the figures and the treasures vanish, and nothing remains but the fact that they have been. The light of creation and of its spirit is extinct; there is an end of all progress; there remain only steps; nothing but scattered beings:—at most they that have been, are confounded in the dust; and all that is of a higher nature must be gathered afresh. God from all eternity has seen nothing but perpetual beginnings after perpetual endings; his sun sheds forth the pallid light of an everlasting, never-setting sunset upon an inter-
