hard to find the imperceptible links that have brought so many disparate ideas together.  A man lets fall a word which he detaches from what has gone before, and what has followed in his head; another does the same, and then let him catch the thread who can.  A single physical quality may lead the mind that is engaged upon it to an infinity of different things.  Take a colour—­yellow, for instance; gold is yellow, silk is yellow, care is yellow, bile is yellow, straw is yellow; to how many other threads does not this thread answer?  Madness, dreaming, the rambling of conversation, all consist in passing from one object to another, through the medium of some common quality."[220]

Annihilation.—­“The conversation took a serious turn.  They spoke of the horror that we all feel for annihilation.

“‘Ah,’ cried Father Hoop, ’be good enough to leave me out, if you please.  I have been too uncomfortable the first time to have any wish to come back.  If they would give me an immortality of bliss for a single day of purgatory, I would not take it.  The best that can befall us is to cease to be.’

“This set me musing, and it seemed to me that so long as I was in good health I should agree with Father Hoop; but that, at the last instant, I should perhaps purchase the happiness of living again by a thousand, nay, ten thousand, years of hell.  Ah, my dear, if I thought that I should see you again, I should soon persuade myself of what a daughter once succeeded in persuading her father on his deathbed.  He was an old usurer; a priest had sworn to him that he would be damned unless he made restitution.  He resolved to comply, and calling his daughter to his bedside, said to her:  ’My child, you thought I should leave you very rich, and so I should; but the man there insists that I shall burn in hell-fire for ever, if I die without making restitution.’  ’You are talking nonsense, father, with your restitution and your damnation,’ the daughter answered; ’with your character I you will not have been damned ten years, before you will be perfectly used to it.’

“This struck him as true, and he died without making restitution.

“And so behold us launched into a discussion on life and death, on the world and its alleged Creator.

“Some one remarked that whether there be a God or no, it is impossible to introduce that device either into nature or into a discussion without darkening it.

“Another said that if a single supposition explained all the phenomena, it would not follow from this that it is true; for who knows whether the general order only allows of one reason?  What, then, must we think of a supposition which, so far from resolving the one difficulty for the sake of which people imagined it, only makes an infinity of others spring up from it?

“I believe, my dear, that our chat by the fireside still amuses you; so I go on.