sed 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. They are believed to be extremely numerous, far
more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown planets, full grown, in
large batches at a time; but they can only leave the unborn world by
taking the steps necessary for their arrival here--which is, in fact, by
suicide.

They ought to be a happy people, for they have no extremes of good or ill
fortune; never marrying, but living in a state much like that fabled by
the poets as the primitive condition of mankind. In spite of this,
however, they are incessantly complaining; they know that we in this
world have bodies, and indeed they know everything else about us, for
they move among us whithersoever they will, and can read our thoughts, as
well as survey our actions at pleasure. One would think that this should
be enough for them; and indeed most of them are alive to the desperate
risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that body with
"sensible warm motion" which they so much desire; nevertheless, there are
some to whom the _ennui_ of a disembodied existence is so intolerable
that they will venture anything for a change; so they resolve to quit.
The conditions which they must accept are so uncertain, that none but the
most foolish of the unborn will consent to take them; and it is from
t