convey and cumulate ideas, and muscles obey volition; mind, as in those
animals that have more than the elementary, instincts; mind, as it might
be in men, were men not immortal. As my eyes, in the Vision, followed the
azure light, undulating as before, through the cells of the brain, and
crossing the red amidst the labyrinth of the nerves, I perceived that the
essence of that azure light had undergone a change: it had lost that
faculty of continuous and concentred power by which man improves on the
works of the past, and weaves schemes to be developed in the future of
remote generations; it had lost all sympathy in the past, because it had
lost all conception of a future beyond the grave; it had lost conscience,
it had lost remorse; the being it informed was no longer accountable
through eternity for the employment of time. The azure light was even
more vivid in certain organs useful to the conservation of existence, as
in those organs I had observed it more vivid among some of the inferior
animals than it is in man,--secretiveness, destructiveness, and the ready
perception of things immediate to the wants of the day; and the azure
light was brilliant in cerebral cells, where before it had been dark, such
as those which harbour mirthfulness and hope, for there the light was
recruited by the exuberant health of the joyous animal-being. But it was
lead-like, or dim, in the great social organs, through which man
subordinates his own interest to that of his species, and utterly lost in
those through which man is reminded of his duties to the throne of his
Maker.

In that marvellous penetration with which the Vision endowed me, I
perceived that in this mind, though in energy far superior to many; though
retaining, from memories of the former existence, the relics of a culture
wide and in some things profound; though sharpened and quickened into
formidable, if desultory, force whenever it schemed or aimed at the animal
self-conservation which now made its master--impulse or instinct; and