of deceased persons. During the whole existence of these establishments, not one of the bodies transported into those asylums has been known to return to life, as the authentic declarations of the attendant doctors agree. The usefulness of such mortuary houses is still more questionable in our time, when we have a positive and certain means of recognizing real death. Those police regulations that forbid autopsies and interments until the full term of delay for twenty-four hours, measured from the declaration of death, still remain prudent precautions, but they do not lessen at all the certainty of that evidence furnished by the stopping of the heart. When the heart has definitely ceased to beat, then resurrection is no longer possible, and the life which deserts it is preparing to enter upon a new cycle.
Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, speaks of "that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," and mournfully asks, what must be the dreams of the man to whom death has opened the portals of those gloomy regions. We can give no clearer answer, in the name of physiology, than Shakespeare's prince gives. Physiology is dumb as to the destiny of the soul after death; of that it teaches, and it can teach us, nothing. It is plain, and it would be childish to deny it, that any psychical or sentient manifestation, and any concrete representation of the personality, are impossible after death. The dissolution of the organism annihilates surely, and of necessity, the functions of sensation, motion, and will, which are inseparable from a certain combination of material conditions. We can feel, move, and will, only so far as we have organs for reception, transmission, and execution. These assurances of science are above discussion, and should be accepted without reserve. Do they tell us any thing of the destiny of the psychical principles themselves? Again we say, No, and for the very simple reason that science does not attain to those principles; but metaphysics, which does attain to them, authorizes us, nay, further, compels us to believe that they are immortal. They are immortal, as the principles of motion, the principles of perception, all the active unities of the world, are immortal. What is the general characteristic of those unities? It is that of being simple, which means being indestructible, which means being in harmonious mutual connection, after such a manner that each one of them perceives the infinite order of the other. If this connection did not exist, there would be no world. What is the characteristic of the psychical unities more especially? It is that of having, besides the consciousness of such perception, the feeling also of the relations that bind the whole together, and those faculties, more or less developed, which that consciousness and that perception imply. But why should these unities be any more perishable than the others? Why, if all these forces, all these activities, are eternal, should those alone not possess eternity which have this high privilege, that of knowing the infinite relations which the others sustain without knowing that they do so?
