Does it leave the body when life is
artificially prolonged in a state of unconsciousness--by hypnotism,
for instance? Is it more closely bound up with animal life, or with
intelligence? If with either, has it a definite abiding place in the
heart, or in the brain? Since its presence depends directly on life, so
far as I know, it belongs to the body rather than to the brain. I once
made a rabbit live an hour without its head. With a man that experiment
would need careful manipulation--I would like to try it. Or is it all
a question of that phantom, Vitality? Then the presence of the soul
depends upon the potential excitability of the nerves, and, as far as
we know, it must leave the body not more than twenty-four hours after
death, and it certainly does not leave the body at the moment of dying.
But if of the nerves, then what is the condition of the soul in the
hypnotic state? Unorna hypnotises our old friend there--and our young
one, too. For her, they have nerves. At her touch they wake, they sleep,
they move, they feel, they speak. But they have no nerves for me. I can
cut them with knives, burn them, turn the life-blood of the one into
the arteries of the other--they feel nothing. If the soul is of the
nerves--or of the vitality, then they have souls for Unorna, and none
for me. That is absurd. Where is that old man's soul? He has slept for
years. Has not his soul been somewhere else in the meanwhile? If we
could keep him asleep for centuries, or for scores of centuries, like
that frog found alive in a rock, would his soul--able by the hypothesis
to pass through rocks or universes--stay by him? Could an ingenious
sinner escape damnation for a few thousand years by being hypnotised?
Verily the soul is a very unaccountable thing, and what is still more
unaccountable is that I believe in it.
Pages:
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164