d
that the essence of that azure light had undergone a change: it had lost
that faculty of continuous and concentred power by which man improves on
the works of the past, and weaves schemes to be developed in the future
of remote generations; it had lost all sympathy in the past, because
it had lost all conception of a future beyond the grave; it had lost
conscience, it had lost remorse; the being it informed was no longer
accountable through eternity for the employment of time. The azure light
was even more vivid in certain organs useful to the conservation of
existence, as in those organs I had observed it more vivid among some of
the inferior animals than it is in man,--secretiveness, destructiveness,
and the ready perception of things immediate to the wants of the day;
and the azure light was brilliant in cerebral cells, where before it had
been dark, such as those which harbour mirthfulness and hope, for
there the light was recruited by the exuberant health of the joyous
animal-being. But it was lead-like, or dim, in the great social organs,
through which man subordinates his own interest to that of his species,
and utterly lost in those through which man is reminded of his duties to
the throne of his Maker.

In that marvellous penetration with which the Vision endowed me, I
perceived that in this mind, though in energy far superior to many;
though retaining, from memories of the former existence, the relics of a
culture wide and in some things profound; though sharpened and quickened
into formidable, if desultory, force whenever it schemed or aimed at the
animal self-conservation which now made its master--impulse or instinct;
and though among the reminiscences of its state before its change
were arts which I could not comprehend, but which I felt were dark
and terrible, lending to a will never checked by remorse arms that no
healthful philosophy has placed in the arsenal of disciplined genius;
though the mind in itself had an ally in a body as perfect in strength
and elasticity as man can take from the favour of nature,--still, I say,
I felt that the mind wanted the something without which men never could
found cities, frame laws, bind together, beautify, exalt the elements
of this world, by creeds that habitually subject them to a reference to
another. The ant and the bee and the beaver congregate and construct;
but they do not improve. Man improves because the future impels onward
that which is not found in the