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WHAT ARE THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE SUPERHUMAN BEING?—THE PHYSICAL FORM, SENSES, DEGREE OF INTELLIGENCE, AND FACULTIES OF THE SUPERHUMAN BEING

NOTWITHSTANDING the daring of such an attempt, let us now endeavour to form some idea of the radiant creatures which float in the mysterious and sublime regions of that empyrean which hides them from our view. Let us try to discern the attributes, form, and qualities of the superhuman being.

Like the human, the superhuman being possesses the three elements of the aggregate, the body, the soul, and the life. In order to gain some idea of him, we must examine each of these three elements separately.

The Body of the Superhuman Being.—We might perhaps conceive a superhuman being without a body; we might imagine that the soul, purely spiritual, constitutes the blessed dweller in ethereal space. But it is not thus that we do conceive him. Absolute immateriality appears to us to apply only to a being much more elevated in the moral hierarchy than the superhuman one—a being of whom we shall speak hereafter. We believe that the inhabitant of the ethereal spaces has a body; that the soul, leaving its terrestrial dwelling, incarnates itself in a body, as it did here below. But this body must be provided with qualities infinitely superior to those which belong to the human body. First, let us inquire what the form of this body may be. The painters of the Renaissance, whom modern artists follow in this respect, give to the angel the form of a young and handsome man, furnished with white wings, which bear him through the air on his celestial missions. This image is both coarse and poetic. It is poetic because it responds to the idea which we have of the radiant creature who dwells in ethereal space; and it is coarse, because it gives to a being far superior to man the physical attributes of man, which is inadmissible.

Painters who, like Raphael, represent the angel by the head of a child, with wings, give a far more profound expression to the same thought. By suppressing the larger portion of the body, and reducing the seraphic being to the head, the seat of intelligence, they indicate that in the angel of the Christian belief the spiritual dominates, in immense proportion, over the material part.

We shall not be expected to delineate the form of the dwellers in the realms of ether. We can only say, that, as ether is an excessively subtle and rarefied fluid, it necessarily follows that the superhuman being who is to float and fly in its light masses, must be wonderfully light, must be composed of extraordinary subtle substances. A slight material tissue, animated by life, a vaporous, diaphanous drapery of living matter, such do we represent the superhuman being to our fancy.

How is this body supported? Does it need food for its maintenance, like the bodies of men and of animals? We may reply with confidence that food—that tyrannous obligation of the human and the animal species—is spared to the inhabitants of the planetary ether. Their bodies must be supported and refreshed by mere respiration of the fluid in which they exist.

Let us consider the immense space occupied in the lives of animals by their need of alimentation. Many animals, especially those which live in the water, have an incessant need of food. They must eat always, without intermission, or they die of inanition. Among superior animals, the necessity for eating and drinking is less imperious, because the respiratory function comes to their aid, bringing into the body, by the absorption of oxygen and a small proportion of azote, a certain amount of reparative element, as a supplement to alimentary substances. Man profits largely by this advantage. Our respiration is a function of the highest importance, and it bears a great share in the reparation of all our organs. The oxygen which our blood borrows from the air in breathing, contributes largely to our nutrition. The respiratory function in birds is very active, and the organs which exercise it are largely developed, and in their nutrition also oxygen counts largely, and takes the place of a certain quantity of food.

It is our belief that the respiration of the ether in which he lives, suffices for the support of the material body of the superhuman being, and that the necessity for eating and drinking has no place in his existence.

I do not know whether my reader forms an exact conception of the consequences which would result from the theory, that the superhuman beings whom we are contemplating are exempted from all need of food. Those consequences will be most readily comprehended, if we consider that it is the pressing obligation of procuring food which renders the lives of animals so miserable. Forced incessantly to seek their subsistence, animals are entirely given up to this grovelling occupation; thence come their passions, their quarrels, and their sufferings. It is much the same in the case of man, though in a less degree. The necessity for providing for the aliment of every day, the obligation of earning his daily bread—as the popular phrase has it—is the great cause of the labours and the sufferings of the human species. Supposing that man could live, develop himself, and sustain his life without eating—that the mere respiration of air would supply the waste of his organs—what a revolution would be effected in human society. Hateful passions, wars, and rivalries would disappear from the earth. The golden age, dreamed of by the poets, would be the certain consequence of such an organic disposition.

This blessing of nature, refused to man, assuredly belongs to the superhuman being. We may conclude also that the evil passions, which are a sad attribute of our species, would be unknown in the home of these privileged creatures. Released from the toil of seeking their food, living and repairing their functions by the mere effect of respiration—an involuntary and unconscious act (as the circulation of the blood and absorption are unconscious acts in men and animals)—the inhabitants of the ethereal spaces must be able to abandon themselves exclusively to impressions of unmixed happiness and serenity.

The forces of our body become rapidly exhausted; we cannot exercise our functions for a certain time without experiencing fatigue. In order to transport ourselves from one place to another, to carry burthens, to go up or down any height, to walk, we are obliged to expend these forces, and lassitude immediately ensues. We cannot exercise the faculty of thought for more than a certain time. At the end of a short period attention fails, and thought is suspended. In short, our corporeal machine, beautifully ordered, is subject to a thousand derangements, which we call diseases.

From the sense of fatigue, from the continual menace of illness by organic derangement, the dwellers in the ether are free. Rest is not for them, as for us, a necessity ensuing on exercise. The body of the superhuman being, inaccessible to fatigue, does not need repose. Unembarrassed by the mechanism of a complicated machine, it subsists and sustains itself by the unaided force of the life which animates it. Its sole physiological function, probably, is the inhalation of ether, a function which, it is easy to conceive, may be exercised without the aid of numerous organs, if we see a whole class of animals—the Batrachian—for whose respiration the bare and simple skin suffices.

If we admit, that the only function which the superhuman being has to exercise is that of respiration, the extreme simplicity of his body will be easily understood. The numerous and complicated organs and apparatus which exist in the bodies of men and animals, have for their object the exercise of the functions of nutrition and reproduction. These functions being suppressed in the creature whom we are considering, his body must be proportionably lightened. Everything is reduced to respiration, and the preservation and maintenance of the faculties of the soul; all is in harmony with those ends. We admire, with good reason, the wise mechanism of the bodies of men and animals; but, if human anatomy reveals prodigies in our structure, marvellous provision in securing the preservation of the individual and his reproduction, what infinitely greater marvels would, if we were but permitted to study it, be revealed by the organization of the body of the superhuman being, in which everything is calculated to secure the maintenance and the perfection of the soul. With what astonishment should we learn the use and the purpose of the different parts of that glorious body, discover the relations of resemblance or of origin between the living economy of the human, and the living economy of the superhuman being, and divine the relations which might exist between the organs of the superhuman being and those which he should assume in another life, still superior, in which he should be the same being, again resuscitated in new glory and fuller perfection!

The special organization of the being whom we are describing would give him the power of transporting himself in a very short space of time from one place to another, and of traversing great distances with extraordinary rapidity. We are but simple human beings, and yet by thought we devour space, and travel, in a twinkling, from one end of the globe to another; may we not therefore believe that the bodies of superhuman beings, in whom the spiritual principle is dominant, are endowed with the privilege of passing from one point in space to another, with a rapidity which the speed of electricity enables us to measure?

The superhuman being, who does not require to eat or drink, or rest, who is always active, and incessantly sensible, has no need of sleep. Sleep is no more necessary for the reparation of his forces, than food for their creation. We know that man is deprived of one third of his existence, by the imperious necessity for sleep. A man who dies at thirty years of age, has in reality lived for twenty only; he has slept all the rest of the time! What a poor notion this conveys of the condition of man! Whence arises this need of sleep? It arises from the fact that our forces, impaired by their exercise, require inaction and motionlessness for their repair—this is attained in the kind of temporary death produced by the suspension of the greater portion of the vital action, in sleep. During sleep, man prepares and stores up the forces which he will require to expend during the ensuing period. He devotes the night to this physical reparation, as much in obedience to what he observes in all the other portions of creation, as in obedience to the customs of civilization. But it is probable that all the forces of the superhuman being are inexhaustible, and that they do not require sleep, which is one of the hardest conditions of human existence. Everything leads us to believe that perpetual wakefulness is the permanent state of the superhuman being, and that the word "sleep" would have no meaning for him.

Darkness must be equally unknown to all those beings who float in the ethereal spaces. Our night and day are produced alternatively by the rotation of the earth upon her axis, a rotation which hides the sun from her view during one half of her revolution. This rotatory motion draws our atmosphere with it, but its influence extends no further, the ether which surmounts our atmosphere is not subject to it. That fluid mass remains motionless, while the earth and its atmosphere turn upon their axis. The superhuman beings, who, according to our ideas, inhabit the planetary ether, are not drawn into this motion. They behold the earth revolving beneath them, but, being placed outside its movements, they never lose sight of the radiant sun-star.

Night, we repeat, is an accidental phenomenon, which belongs to the planets only, because they have a hemisphere now illumined, and then not illumined by the sun; but night is unknown to the remainder of the universe. The superhuman beings, who people the regions far above the planets, never lose sight of the sun, and their happy days pass in the midst of an ocean of light.

Let us pass on to the consideration of the senses which these superhuman beings probably possess, premising:

1. That the superhuman being must be endowed with the same senses which we possess, but that those senses are infinitely more acute and exquisite than ours.

2. That he must possess special senses, unknown to us.

What are the new senses enjoyed by the superhuman being? It would be impossible to return a satisfactory reply to this question. We have no knowledge of any other senses than those with which we ourselves are endowed, and no amount of genius could enable any man to divine the object of a sense denied to him by nature. Try to give a man born blind an idea of the colour, red; and he will answer: "Yes, I understand! It is piercing, like the sound of a trumpet!" Try to give a man born deaf an idea of the sound of the harp, and he will answer: "Yes! It is gentle and tender, like the green grass of the fields!" Let us renounce, once for all, any attempt to define the senses with which nature endows the beings who people the ethereal plains; these senses belong to objects and ideas the mere notion of which is forbidden to us.

There is a well-known story of a man born blind, upon whom the famous surgeon Childesen operated. Having recovered his sight, the patient was a long time learning the use of his eyes; he was obliged to educate those organs, step by step, and by slow degrees to form his intelligence. Equally well known is Condillac's beautiful fiction, in which he imagines a man born into the world without the senses of sight, speech, and hearing, and who is, therefore, destitute of ideas. By degrees, he is endowed with each of these senses, and the philosopher thus composes, bit by bit, a soul which feels, and a mind which thinks. This philosophical idea has been greatly admired. Like the man-statue of Condillac, we are only, while here below, imperfect statues, endowed with but a small number of senses. When, however, we shall have reached the superior regions destined to our ennobled condition, we shall be put in possession of new senses, such as our reason dimly perceives, and our hearts long for.

We cannot, as we have previously said, divine what the new senses which shall be granted to the superhuman being are to be, because they belong to objects and ideas of which we are ignorant, and to forms which are exclusively proper to worlds at present hidden from our eyes. The kingdom of the planetary ether has its geography, its powers, its passions, and its laws; and the new senses of men, resuscitated to that glorious existence, will be exercised upon those objects.

The only thing which we can safely prognosticate is that all the senses which we now possess will then exist in their full perfection—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is allowable to deduce this process of future perfection by reasoning from the extraordinary development of certain senses in the case of animals.

The sense of smell is developed in the hunting dog to a degree which surpasses our imagination. How can we understand this quite ordinary fact, that the dog perceives the scent which has emanated from a hare or a partridge which has passed by the place at which he is smelling many hours previously, and is now several leagues away! The perfection of sight in the eagle and other birds of prey astonishes us equally. These birds, floating at an immense height, see their prey upon the earth, creatures much smaller than themselves, and descend upon them without deviating from the perpendicular line of their flight. The bat, accidentally deprived of sight, supplies this deficiency so well by the sense of touch, by means of his membranous wings, that he guides himself through the air, and finds his way to the interior of human dwellings, as unerringly as if he had the full use of his eyesight. To such a degree of exquisite sensibility has the sense of hearing attained among native Indian tribes, that a man, laying his ear against the earth, will detect the tread of an enemy at the distance of a league. Among musicians, also, how must the sense of hearing be cultivated by a man, who, partly by a natural gift, and partly by practice, comes to be able to detect the most minute difference in the tone of one instrument among fifty different kinds, all played at once, in an orchestra. Supposing that the senses of the superhuman being should have acquired the degree of extraordinary activity which is common to animals, and, in certain cases, to man, we can form some estimate of the power and extent of such a sensorial system.

We can also arrive at some idea of the perfection of the senses attained by resuscitated man, by considering the accession of power which our own senses may receive by the assistance of science and art. Before the invention of the microscope, no one ever imagined that the eye could penetrate the mysteries of that world in miniature well named the Infinitely Little, until then absolutely unknown; no one had ever divined, for instance, that in one drop of water might be seen myriads of living beings. These beings have existed throughout all time, but man has been able to contemplate them for only two centuries. Our visual power over microscopic beings was until then unknown. The least enlightened, the most careless student of this day, regards with indifference things which Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pliny, Galienus, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon could not have contemplated, or even suspected to exist. The discovery of the telescope, in the days of Kepler and Galileo, hurled back the boundaries of the human intellect and threw open to its investigation a domain hitherto sealed from its sight. There, where Hipparchus and Ptolemy had seen nothing, Galileo, Huyghens, Kepler, made, in a few nights, by the aid of the telescope, discoveries of hitherto unsuspected celestial splendour. The satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, a multitude of new stars, the phases of Venus, and, at a later period, the discovery of new planets only to be seen by the telescope, the observation of spots on the sun, and the revolution of the nebulæ into collections of stars, were the almost immediate consequences of the invention of the telescope. Thus we learned that, by the aid of art, the human eye can penetrate the most distant regions of heaven.

Let us now suppose all the powers of the telescope and all those of the microscope concentrated in the sense of vision; that is to say, that in addition to all objects placed at ordinary distances, it can discern all microscopic objects, and at the same time all the celestial bodies invisible to the naked eye, and you will have an idea of what the sense of sight is, in the superhuman being.

There is no occasion to dwell upon the extraordinary proportions which our accumulated knowledge would assume, if our sight could enjoy those extraordinary powers of extension, if it could perform simultaneously the functions of the telescope and the microscope. Science would march forward with the tread of a giant. What enormous progress would be made by chemistry if our eyes could penetrate into the interior of all bodies, beholding their molecules, estimating their relative volume, their arrangement, and the form and colour of their atoms. A glance would reveal to us secrets of chemical solutions such as the genius of a Lavoisier could not penetrate. Physics would contain no further mysteries for us, for we should know, by simply using our eyes, everything which we are now painfully striving to divine by reason, and by the aid of difficult and uncertain experiments. We should see why and how bodies are warmed and acquire electricity. We should have the explanation of the mathematical laws in obedience to which the physical forces, light, heat, and magnetism are exercised. Our eyes would suffice for the solution of those physical and mechanical problems before which the genius of such men as Newton, Malus, Ampère, and Gay-Lussac stands still.

We do not doubt that the superhuman being is endowed with sight thus marvellously perfect.

We might carry this argument out in detail, applying it to all the other senses, but enough has been said to illustrate the exaltation and perfecting of those senses which man possesses only in their rudiments, in the favoured dwellers in a superior sphere. We will only add, that the result of such a degree of perfection of the senses is, that the superhuman being can move with a rapidity, of which light and electricity only can give us some notion, that is to say, that these perfected senses can be used at great distances, and with great promptitude. If the entire body of the superhuman being can transport itself with wonderful rapidity from one place to another, as we have already admitted, his senses can also act from, and at great distances. We do not think we can err in comparing the actions of the dwellers in the invisible world which we presume to investigate, with the phenomena of light and electricity.

Does sex exist in the superhuman being? Assuredly not. The Christian religion defines its absence in the angel. The angel of the Christian creeds has the features of either man or woman, the mild face of a youth, or the pathetic beauty of a girl. Sex is suppressed, the individual is androgynous. Thus, too, it must be in the case of the superhuman being. The reciprocal affection which reigns among the blessed dwellers in the ether does not require diversity of sex.

The affections undergo a purifying process, according as they are elevated, from those of the animals to those of man. The animals have but little of the sentiment of friendship. Love, with its material impulses, is almost all they know. The sentiments of affection possessed by animals, apart from their carnal instincts, reduce themselves to those of maternity, which are strong and sincere, but of short duration. Their young are the objects of attentive care and caresses while their helplessness demands such aid, but as soon as they can live on their own resources they are abandoned by the mothers, who no longer even recognize them. There is no constant, lasting affection in animals, except the sentiment of love, which is caused by their sexual necessities. The sentiments of affection entertained by man are numerous, and frequently noble and pure. We love our mothers and our sons as long as our hearts beat in our breasts. We love our brothers, our sisters, and our relations with a sentiment in which there is nothing carnal, and which is deeply rooted in the soul. If love is often inseparably attached to physical desires, it can, nevertheless, shake itself free from them, and a disinterested friendship frequently survives the extinction of sensual feeling. In this respect we are far superior to the animals. Let us go a step further, even to the supernatural being, the next link in the chain to ourselves, and we shall find the sentiment of affection entirely detached from the consideration of sex. In that sublime and blessed realm which they inhabit, superhuman beings are all of the same organic type. They need not, in order to love one another, to belong to two opposite sexes, or different groups of organization: their tenderness is the result of the serenity of the infinite purity of souls, of the sympathy evoked by common perfections.

On the other hand, the ethereal region which awaits us is the scene of the reunion of those who have loved one another in this world. There the father will find the son, and the mother will rejoin the daughter, torn from each by death, there husbands and wives will meet, and the separation of friends come to an end. But, under their new form, in the perfected body wherein their regenerated souls shall dwell, there is no more sex, and love is for all an ideal, noble, and exquisitely pure sentiment.

How blind and self-interested is love here below! How narrow and egotistical a sentiment is friendship. It cannot enlarge itself without pain and difficulty, to embrace the totality of the human kind. Why is it so hard for it to lift itself up to the sublime Creator of the worlds? Why do we not love God as we love our neighbours? In the upper world it will be far otherwise. Our faculty of loving, limited here by fleshly bonds, will be set free there, from every sensual restraint. Man, resuscitated to glory, will love his wife as he loves his children, his friends, and his brethren. His affections will never more be degraded by his senses. The happiness which this purified sentiment, constantly received from ever living sources, will afford him, will suffice to fill and satisfy his soul. His power of loving will be extended to all nature, it will be spread abroad over the most elevated spheres; his soul will be exalted by the sublime sensations of this universal love, this wide sympathy with the whole creation. True charity, comprehending the entire universe, will burn in all hearts. The love of God will rule over all these multiplied affections, from the height of His infinite power, and the fervour of our sentiments of love for our kind will be crowned by our sublime adoration of the Creator of all.

But, it will be said, if superhuman beings are of no sex, how are they to be reproduced, how is the species to be kept up, and multiplied? There will be no need of reproduction, the species of the superhuman being will not require to be maintained, or multiplied. The reproduction, the preservation of his species is the business of the inhabitants of the inferior worlds, of the earth and the planets. Such is their lot, such the task imposed upon them by nature. But reproduction is unknown and unnecessary to the fortunate beings who dwell in the planetary ether. From the earth and the other planets fresh and ever fresh phalanxes are despatched to them. The battalions of the elect are recruited by arrivals from the lower worlds. Below is the multiplication of individuals; above is the sojourn of blessed beings, who have no need of maintaining their species, because the laws of their destiny differ from those which rule the lot of terrestrial man. Reproduction is the task of inferior worlds, permanence is the inheritance of the world above.

The Soul of the Superhuman Being. In an excellent volume of popular science, the Universe, by Dr. Pouchet, director of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen, we find a striking definition. Dr. Pouchet informs us that a German naturalist, Bremser, lays down, as a principle, that, in man, matter and spirit exist in almost equal parts; that is, to say, that man is half spirit and half matter. Bremser, in advancing this proposition, takes his stand upon the fact that, in man, it is sometimes spirit which governs and subdues matter, and sometimes matter which dictates laws to spirit, with equal power and success on the side of each.3

Admitting, with the German philosopher, that this relation is true, we would say, that, while in man the proportion of the soul is fifty in one hundred, this proportion, in the superhuman being, is undoubtedly from eighty to eighty-five in one hundred. Of course we only employ this valuation to make our idea comprehensible, and give these figures only to prove that facts in the intellectual order may be submitted to weight, measure, and comparison, all which the world supposes to be impossible.

The soul has a preponderating share in the superhuman being. That is what we need to know, and to remember. Let us now endeavour to analyze the soul of the superhuman being, as we have analyzed his senses.

If the senses of the superhuman being are numerous and exquisitely acute, the faculties of his soul, which are intimately allied to the exercise of the senses, and depend on their perfection, must also be singularly active and powerful. We know that in men the faculties of the soul are feeble and limited. We have so short a time to pass upon the earth, that very powerful faculties would be of no use to us; they would not have time to be developed, or efficaciously employed. But everything is magnified and elevated in the superior world which awaits us; consequently the faculties of the thinking creature who inhabits the realms on high must be numerous and of vast extent.

We must repeat, concerning the faculties of the soul of the superhuman being, what we have just said concerning his senses. The superhuman being must be provided with new faculties, and also those faculties which he has brought with him from the earth must be singularly perfected. To determine the nature and the object of the new faculties bestowed upon the superhuman being would be impossible, because those faculties belong to the superior world which is unknown to us; they respond to moral wants of which we have no conception. Let us, therefore, renounce all idea of discovering the nature of those new faculties, and content ourselves with examining the degree of perfection which may be attained by those faculties of the soul which actually belong to man.

Attention, thought, reason, will, and judgment, all which render us what we are, must acquire special force and sureness in the superhuman being. La Bruyère has said that there is nothing more rare in this world than the spirit of discernment; which means that judgment and good sense are excessively rare. When we have lived for a while among men, we recognize how thoroughly well founded the saying is. We may safely assert, without being over-misanthropical, that among a hundred men there will be not more than one or two possessed of sound judgment. In the majority of instances, ignorance, prejudices, and passion contend with judgment, so that, as La Bruyère says, good sense is much more rare than pearls and diamonds. This great and precious faculty of judgment, in which the majority of human beings are deficient, cannot be wanting in the inhabitants of the other world; there it must be the universal rule, here it is the exception.

The most precious of all faculties, enabling us to form large and lofty ideas and comparisons, whose outcome is knowledge, is memory. But how imperfect, changeable, weak, and, one may say, sickly, is our memory! It is absolutely mute respecting the whole period which preceded our birth, and during which, nevertheless, we existed. It is also as silent respecting all that concerns the early portion of our life. We retain no recollection of the care which was lavished upon our childhood. A child who loses its mother in infancy has never known a mother; for it, the mother has never existed. If those who saw us in the cradle did not recount our actions during that period, we should be entirely ignorant of them. We have to witness the successive stages of infancy, the sucking child, the long clothes, the staggering steps, the little go-cart, in order to realize that we too have been like that infant, have gone through those stages of being. Memory, which is not developed at all in man until he is a year old, and which becomes extinct in old men, is subject, even when it is at its highest point of activity, to innumerable weaknesses, caused by illness or the want of exercise, so that in fact our hold of this faculty is always precarious. We cannot doubt that in the other life it will have the power, the certainty, and scope which it lacks here below.

At the same time, our memory will be enriched by a number of new subjects. The soul, beholding and understanding the worlds which surround it, will be able to fix the geography of all those different places in its memory. It will know the physical revolutions, the populations, and the legislation of these thousand countries. The superhuman being will know what exists in such planets and their satellites as come within his reach, or as he shall visit. Just as, in order to gain information, we visit America or Australia, so the superhuman being visits Mars or Venus, and furnishes his memory with millions of facts, which it retains and reproduces at will. What immense power must memory, always supplied and always ready at call, bestow on the mind and reason!

Languages are only the expression and the assembling of ideas. Condorcet has said that a science always reduces itself to a well-constructed language. The mathematical sciences employ a language which is perfect, because the science of mathematics is perfect. The language spoken in the planetary spaces must be perfect, because it expresses all the knowledge of superhuman beings, and this knowledge is immense. The more the mind knows, the better it expresses:—the superhuman being, who is highly informed, will have a very expressive language, which will also be universal.

The language of mathematics is understood by the peoples of both hemispheres. Algebra can be read by a Frenchman or a German, as well as by an Australian or a Chinese, on account of the simplicity and perfection of the conventional signs which it uses. The language of mathematics, which is truly universal, makes us infer that the language spoken in the planetary space must be also universal, and common, without distinction, to all the inhabitants of the ethereal worlds.

Owing to the immense scope of their faculties, and to the perfection of their language, in itself a certain means of increasing and exalting their knowledge, superhuman beings have a power of reasoning, and a clearness of judgment, which, added to the immense number of facts stored in their memory, place them in possession of absolute science. Arduous questions, before which the mind of man humbly confesses its powerlessness, or which drive him mad if he persists in the effort to solve them, such as the thought of the Infinite, the idea of the First Cause of the Universe, the Essence of Divinity, all these problems, forbidden to us, are easily accessible to these mighty thinkers. He who is regarded by mankind as a genius of the first order, an Aristotle, a Keppler, a Newton, a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Molière, a Mozart, a Lavoisier, a Laplace, a Cuvier, a Victor Hugo, would be among them a babbling child. No science, no moral idea is above their conception. Beneath their feet rolls the earth, with the splendid train of the planets, its sisters; they behold the planets of our solar system gravitating in harmonious order round the great central star, which deluges them with its light. From the height of their sublime abode they witness the infinitely various spectacles furnished by the elemental strife of our poor globe, and those which resemble it; and, happier than terrestrial humanity, they admire the works of God, while knowing the secret of their mechanism. In the moral order they have penetrated the great Wherefore! They know why man exists, and why they themselves exist. They know whence they come, and whither they are going; and we, alas! know neither. Where, to our eyes, there is only confusion, they perceive harmony and order. The designs of God are distinctly apparent to them, and also the events of the lives of nations and individuals, which often seem to us cruel, unjust, and bad on the part of God; but they understand that these events are just and useful, and worthy of our heartfelt gratitude.

We also think, that in the ethereal spaces time is an element which does not count. We believe this, because time does not exist for God, and all superhuman beings approach, by their perfections, the entirely spiritual nature, and consequently approach God. We are confirmed in this belief by the fact, that very profound grief resists time, that there is no limit in duration to the great blows struck at the human soul, that the loss of a beloved being is felt as keenly after a long interval as when he was taken away.

Thus, time, which is everything to man, which is not only, according to the English adage, "money," but is also the instrument of our wisdom, our studies, and our attainments—far otherwise precious than money—time does not count in the life of the superhuman being. He awaits, without impatience and without suffering, the arrival of the beings whom he has loved and left upon the earth at his peaceful abode; and when their re-union takes place, he and they enjoy happiness which no inquietude concerning the future can ever trouble. Enabled to despise, to put aside the idea of time, the superhuman being looks on with unutterable serenity, tranquillity, and majesty, at the majestic spectacle, always new and always marvellous, of the revolutions of the stars, and the great movements of the universe.

The Life of the Superhuman Being.—In completion of our speculation upon the attributes of the superhuman being, we shall consider the life which animates him and gives his body its active qualities.

We have said that, in our belief, the superhuman being proceeds from the soul of a man which has domiciled itself afresh, in a new body, in the bosom of the world of ether. Is this body destined, at the end of a more or less prolonged period to perish, to be dissolved, to restore its elements to matter, as they are restored by the human body? Shall life be withdrawn from the body of the superhuman being, and shall the soul take flight thence?

We believe that it will be so. Life everywhere implies death, and is its necessary term. We do not cast anchor in the current of the waters of life. If the soul of the superhuman being resides in a living body, this body must die, and its material elements must return to the common reservoir of nature. The torch of life is extinguished in the spaces, as it is extinguished upon earth.

We believe the superhuman being to be mortal. After an interval, whose duration we shall not attempt to fix, he dies; and the soul which dwelt within him escapes, like a sweet perfume from a broken vase. What becomes of the soul which has torn itself away from the body, cold in death? We shall seek after the answer to this question in our next chapter.