Is it not in the loins of the past, and must not the past alter before
the future can do so?
They have a fable that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once,
who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a
twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them. They say
that if any were to be born too prescient now, he would die miserably,
before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty to
descendants.
Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must
perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better
than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils.
Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to the
unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure and
simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous yet more
or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus
neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to
have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as
unsubstantial as their inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and
drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of
doing whatever mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion, as
in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are
they never die--the only form of death in the unborn world being the
leaving it for our own.
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