The day after death, or, Our future life, according to science / translated from the French of Louis Figuier.

  • Louis Figuier
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The day after death, or, Our future life, according to science / translated from the French of Louis Figuier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    feels, and a mind which thinks. This philosophical idea has been greatly admired. Like the man-statue of Condillac, we are only, while her* below, imperfect statues, endowed with but a small number of senses. When, however, we shall have reached the superior regions destined to our ennobled condition, we shall be put in possession of new senses, such as our reason dimly perceives, and our hearts long for. We cannot, as we have previously said, divine what the new senses which shall be granted to the superhuman being are to be, because they belong to objects and ideas of which we are ignorant, and to forms which are exclusively proper to worlds at present hidden from our eyes. The kingdom of the planetary ether has its geography, its powers, its passions, 1 and its laws; and the new senses of men, resuscitated to that glorious existence, wiU be exercised upon those objects. The only thing which we can safely prognosticate is that all the senses which we now possess will then exist in their full perfection—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is I allowable to deduce this process of future perfection by rea- soning from the extraordinary development of certain senses in the case of animals. The sense of smell is developed in the hunting dog to a degree which surpasses our imagination. How can we under- stand this quite ordinary fact, that the dog perceives the scent which has emanated from a hare or a partridge which has passed by the place at which he is smelling many hours previously, and is now several leagues away ! The perfection of sight in the eagle and other birds of prey astonishes us
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