ace towards him; scores of dead
beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be
reviver. Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence.
Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had
all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with
delight and listened with rapture. But they were all still dead, and
they neither spoke or moved a finger. A thought that had more hope in it
than any which had passed through his brain for many years now occupied
and absorbed him. A heavy book lay open on the table by his side, and
from time to time he glanced at a phrase which seemed to attract him.
It was always the same phrase, and two words alone sufficed to bring
him back to contemplation of it. Those two words were "Immortality"
and "Soul." He began to speak aloud to himself, being by nature fond of
speech.

"Yes. The soul is immortal. I am quite willing to grant that. But it
does not in any way follow that it is the source of life, or the seat
of intelligence. The Buddhists distinguished it even from the
individuality. And yet life holds it, and when life ends it takes its
departure. How soon? I do not know. It is not a condition of life,
but life is one of its conditions. 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 not