§ 9: The Soul’s Immortality as Witnessed by Knowledge

Humanity is born a lover of knowledge, a lover of knowing. What is this love of knowledge? What is this longing to know? What does it desire to enjoy? Behold all things stand before the eyes clothed in beauty and orderliness; their presentations are very good; all are endowed with such grace as to provide enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction to all, to satisfy and fulfill their every requirement; how much humanity should have remained satisfied! What abundance of good! Yes, all things are abundantly poured out; yet humanity still seeks and desires to know; a strange desire; whence was it generated in it? To this question we are unable to answer; for it is impossible, altogether impossible to explain without accepting a rational power endowed with spiritual powers pushing it toward this; the desire to know is a demand of the rational soul not satisfied in the multitude of enjoyments, but in the discovery of the reason for creation of each creature and the revelation of the laws of their preservation. The soul seeks the wisdom of the creator in creation, which it seeks to familiarize itself with and enter into the depths of the creative spirit; it seeks to know all things and to contain all things in the intellect, it seeks to become like God.

A curious phenomenon! The entire world is full of grace, all things bear the seal of beauty, all are ready to contribute to the joy of the senses, to satisfy its requirements, and yet the human having only senses does not enjoy, or scorns sensible things for abstract notions? How does the natural human not rest in the enjoyments of the senses? How, when all sensible things are incapable of filling the emptiness of the heart, does one new knowledge, one revealed truth, one new idea, one new discovery, one new unknown fill it and satisfy? How has one knowledge overcome the creatures, one revealed truth? How have the supersensible overcome the sensible in humanity? Truly incomprehensible and more mysterious than all mysteries, unless all this is attributed to the rational soul and its lofty principle and its lofty destiny; for in what class of animals is something similar found? Which of the animals has abandoned the sensible and turned to the search for the supersensible? Which epoch from ages has shown even a single example? As then we have such testimonies of humanity’s supersensible enjoyment, do we not ascend to its supersensible existence? Do we not ascend to that spiritual world, where spirits delight in the knowledge of truth, and seek in it the true character of humanity that has nothing in common with the sensible world? O! Truly, knowledge of the truth is a possession not of matter but of the spirit. Humanity is a spiritual being rather than a material one; hence it delights more in spiritual things than in material things; is it possible that the spirit that has received such longings, so elevated toward God, seeking it in all things, perfecting itself in knowledge of it, should be part of matter to which it passes after death? No! Thousands of times no! The acceptance of such an idea is an outrage against truth, an outrage against the spirit itself and against the spiritual world. No; the spirit is not matter, is not a secretion of the brain, but a particular creature of God molded to image forth on earth the image of the creator and to live eternally in the world of spirits. Yes, humanity was formed for immortality.