“Are there any we do understand, Ella?” rejoined Algernon.  “When I say understand, I mean the word to be used in its minutest and broadest sense.  You say there are many things we may not understand concerning ourselves—­what ones, I pray you, do we fully comprehend?  We are here upon the earth—­so much we know.  We shall die and pass away—­so much we know also.  But how came we here, and why?  How do we exist?  How do we think, reason, speak, feel, move, see, hear, smell, taste?  All these we do, we know; but yet not one—­not a single one of them can we comprehend.  You wish to raise your hand; and forthwith, by some extraordinary power—­extraordinary because you cannot tell where it is, nor how it is—­you raise it.  Why cannot a dead person do the same?  Strange question you will say to yourself with a smile—­but one easily answered!  Why, because in such a person life is extinct—­there is no vital principle—­the heart is stopped—­the blood has ceased to flow in its regular channels!  Ay! but let me ask you why that life is extinct?—­why that breath has stopped?—­and why that blood has ceased to flow?  There was just the same amount of air when the person died as before!  There were the same ingredients still left to stimulate that blood to action!  Then wherefore should both cease?—­and with them the power of thought, reason, speech, and all the other senses?  It was not by a design of the individual himself; for he strove to his utmost to breathe longer; he was not ready to die—­he did not want to quit this earth so soon; and yet with all his efforts to the contrary, reason fled, the breath stopped, the blood ceased, the limbs became palsied and cold, and corruption, decay and dust stood ready to follow.  Now why was this?  There is but one answer:  ‘God willed it!’ If then one question resolves itself into one answer,—­’the will of God’—­so may all of the same species; and we come out, after a long train of analytical reasoning, exactly where we started—­with this difference—­that when we set out, we believed in being able to explain the wherefore; but when we came to the end, we could only assert it as a wonderful fact, whereof not a single iota could we understand.”

Algernon spoke in a clear, distinct, earnest tone—­in a manner that showed the subject was not new to his thoughts; and after a short pause, during which Ella made no reply, he again proceeded.

“In this grand organ of man—­where all things are strange and incomprehensible—­to me the combination of the physical and mental is strangest of all.  The soul and the body are united and yet divided.  Each is distinct from and acts without the other at times, and yet both act in concert with a wonderful power.  The soul plans and the body executes.  The body exercises the soul—­the soul the body.  The one is visible—­the other invisible; the one is mortal—­the other immortal.  Now why do they act together here?  Why was not each placed in its separate sphere of action?  Again:  What is the soul?  Men tell us it is a spirit.  What is a spirit?  An invisible something that never dies.  Who can comprehend it?  None.  Whither does it go when separated forever from the body?  None can answer, save in language of Scripture:  ‘It returns to God who gave it.’”