hing. 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. Suppose the case of the ingenious
sinner. Suppose that he could not escape by his clever trick. Then
his soul must inevitably taste the condition of the damned while he is
asleep. But when he is waked at last, and found to be alive, his soul
must come back to him, glowing from the eternal flames. Unpleasant
thought! Keyork Arabian, you had far better not go to sleep at present.
Since all that is fantastic nonsense, on the face of it, I am inclined
to believe that the presence of the soul is in some way a condition
requisite for life, rather than depending upon it. I wish I could buy a
soul. It is quite certain that life is not a mere mechanical or chemical
process. I have gone too far to believe that. Take man at the very
moment of death--have everything ready, do what you will--my artificial
heart is a very perfect instrument, mechanically speaking--and how long
does it take to start the artificial circulation through the carotid
artery? Not a hundredth part so long a time as drowned people often lie
before being brought back, without a pulsation, without a breath. Yet
I never succeeded, though I have made the artificial heart work on a
narcotised rabbit, and the rabbit died instantly when I stopped the
machine, which proves that it was the machine that kept it alive.
Perhaps if one applied it to a man just before death he might live on
indefinitely, grow fat and flourish so long as the glass heart worked.
Where would his soul be then? In the glass heart, which would have
become the seat of life? Everything, sensible or absurd, which I can
put into words makes the soul seem an impossibility--and yet there is
something which I cannot put into words, but which proves the soul's
existence beyond all doubt. I wish I could buy somebody's soul and
experiment with it."

He ceased and sat staring at his specimens