think it can destroy the soul?

'From Marlbro's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
And Swift expires, a driveller and a show.'

"Towards the close of his life even Kant's giant intellect left him. Do
you suppose that in these various archetypes of intellectual man the soul
was worn out by the years that loosened the strings, or made tuneless the
keys, of the perishing instrument on which the mind must rely for all
notes of its music? If you cannot distinguish the operations of the mind
from the essence of the soul, I know not by what rational inductions you
arrive at the conclusion that the soul is imperishable."

I remained silent. Sir Philip fixed on me his dark eyes quietly and
searchingly, and, after a short pause, said,--

"Almost every known body in nature is susceptible of three several states
of existence,--the solid, the liquid, the aeriform. These conditions
depend on the quantity of heat they contain. The same object at one
moment may be liquid; at the next moment solid; at the next aeriform. The
water that flows before your gaze may stop consolidated into ice, or
ascend into air as a vapour. Thus is man susceptible of three states of
existence,--the animal, the mental, the spiritual; and according as he is
brought into relation or affinity with that occult agency of the whole
natural world, which we familiarly call heat, and which no science has yet
explained, which no scale can weigh, and no eye discern, one or the other
of these three states of being prevails, or is subjected."

I still continued silent, for I was unwilling discourteously to say to a
stranger so much older than myself, that he seemed to me to reverse all