To all which I could only say that the thing had been actually known to happen, and that there were several well-authenticated instances of people having died and come to life again—­instances which no man in his senses could doubt.

“If this be so,” said my opponent, “we must bear it as best we may.”

I then translated for him, as well as I could, the noble speech of Hamlet in which he says that it is the fear lest worse evils may befall us after death which alone prevents us from rushing into death’s arms.

“Nonsense,” he answered, “no man was ever yet stopped from cutting his throat by any such fears as your poet ascribes to him—­and your poet probably knew this perfectly well.  If a man cuts his throat he is at bay, and thinks of nothing but escape, no matter whither, provided he can shuffle off his present.  No.  Men are kept at their posts, not by the fear that if they quit them they may quit a frying-pan for a fire, but by the hope that if they hold on, the fire may burn less fiercely.  ’The respect,’ to quote your poet, ‘that makes calamity of so long a life,’ is the consideration that though calamity may live long, the sufferer may live longer still.”

On this, seeing that there was little probability of our coming to an agreement, I let the argument drop, and my opponent presently left me with as much disapprobation as he could show without being overtly rude.

CHAPTER XVIII:  BIRTH FORMULAE

I heard what follows not from Arowhena, but from Mr. Nosnibor and some of the gentlemen who occasionally dined at the house:  they told me that the Erewhonians believe in pre-existence; and not only this (of which I will write more fully in the next chapter), but they believe that it is of their own free act and deed in a previous state that they come to be born into this world at all.  They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and giving them no peace either of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their protection.  If this were not so (this at least is what they urge), it would be a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another, to say that he should undergo the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the matter.  No man would have any right to get married at all, inasmuch as he can never tell what frightful misery his doing so may entail forcibly upon a being who cannot be unhappy as long as he does not exist.  They feel this so strongly that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders; and have fashioned a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live, and what they do, and the arts and machinations to which they have recourse in order to get themselves into our own world.  But of this more anon:  what I would relate here is their manner of dealing with those who do come.