would like to try it.  Or is it all a question of that phantom, Vitality?  Then the presence of the soul depends upon the potential excitability of the nerves, and, as far as we know, it must leave the body not more than twenty-four hours after death, and it certainly does not leave the body at the moment of dying.  But if of the nerves, then what is the condition of the soul in the hypnotic state?  Unorna hypnotises our old friend there—­and our young one, too.  For her, they have nerves.  At her touch they wake, they sleep, they move, they feel, they speak.  But they have no nerves for me.  I can cut them with knives, burn them, turn the life-blood of the one into the arteries of the other—­they feel nothing.  If the soul is of the nerves—­or of the vitality, then they have souls for Unorna, and none for me.  That is absurd.  Where is that old man’s soul?  He has slept for years.  Has not his soul been somewhere else in the meanwhile?  If we could keep him asleep for centuries, or for scores of centuries, like that frog found alive in a rock, would his soul—­able by the hypothesis to pass through rocks or universes—­stay by him?  Could an ingenious sinner escape damnation for a few thousand years by being hypnotised?  Verily the soul is a very unaccountable thing, and what is still more unaccountable is that I believe in it.  Suppose the case of the ingenious sinner.  Suppose that he could not escape by his clever trick.  Then his soul must inevitably taste the condition of the damned while he is asleep.  But when he is waked at last, and found to be alive, his soul must come back to him, glowing from the eternal flames.  Unpleasant thought!  Keyork Arabian, you had far better not go to sleep at present.  Since all that is fantastic nonsense, on the face of it, I am inclined to believe that the presence of the soul is in some way a condition requisite for life, rather than depending upon it.  I wish I could buy a soul.  It is quite certain that life is not a mere mechanical or chemical process.  I have gone too far to believe that.  Take man at the very moment of death—­have everything ready, do what you will—­my artificial heart is a very perfect instrument, mechanically speaking—­and how long does it take to start the artificial circulation through the carotid artery?  Not a hundredth part so long a time as drowned people often lie before being brought back, without a pulsation, without a breath.  Yet I never succeeded, though I have made the artificial heart work on a narcotised rabbit, and the rabbit died instantly when I stopped the machine, which proves that it was the machine that kept it alive.  Perhaps if one applied it to a man just before death he might live on indefinitely, grow fat and flourish so long as the glass heart worked.  Where would his soul be then?  In the glass heart, which would have become the seat of life?  Everything, sensible or absurd, which I can put into words makes the soul seem an impossibility—­and yet there is something which I cannot put into words, but which proves the soul’s existence beyond all doubt.  I wish I could buy somebody’s soul and experiment with it.”