China Learn

The most obvious fact which philosophers refuse to see is that we have got a body. Tired of seeing our mortal imperfections and our savage instincts and impulses, sometimes our preachers wish that we were made like angels, and yet we are at a total loss to imagine what the angels’ life would be like. We either give the angels a body and a shape like our own-except for a pair of wings-or we don’t. It is interesting that the general conception of an angel is still that of a human body with a pair of wings. I sometimes think that it is an advantage even for angels to have a body with the five senses. If I were to be an angel, I should like to have a school-girl complexion, but how am I going to have a school-girl complexion without a skin? I still should like to drink a glass of tomato juice or iced orange juice, but how am I going to appreciate iced orange juice without having thirst? And how am I going to enjoy food, when I am incapable of hunger? How would an angel paint without pigment, sing without the hearing of sounds, smell the fine morning air without a nose? How would he enjoy the immense satisfaction of scratching an itch, if his skin doesn’t itch? And what a terrible loss in the capacity for happiness that would be! Either we have to have bodies and have all our bodily wants satisfied, or else we are pure spirits and have no satisfactions at all. All satisfactions imply want.

I sometimes think what a terrible punishment it would be for a ghost or an angel to have no body, to look at a stream of cool water and have no feet to plunge into it and get a delightful cooling sensation from it, to see a dish of Peking or Long Island duck and have no tongue to taste it, to see crumpets and have no teeth to chew them, to see the beloved faces of our dear ones and have no emotions to feel toward them. Terribly sad it would be if we should one day return to this earth as ghosts and move silently into our children’s bedroom, to see a child lying there in bed and have no hands to fondle him and no arms to clasp him, no chest for his warmth to penetrate to, no round hollow between cheek and shoulder for him to nestle against, and no ears to hear his voice.

A defense of the angels-without-bodies theory will be found to be most vague and unsatisfying. Such a defender might say, “Ah, yes, but in the world of spirit, we don’t need such satisfactions.” “But what instead have you got?” Complete silence; or perhaps, “VoidPeace-Calm.” “What then do you gain by it?” “Absence of work and pain and sorrow.” I admit such a heaven has a tremendous attraction to galley slaves. Such a negative ideal and conception of happiness is dangerously near to Buddhism and is ultimately to be traced to Asia (Asia Minor, in this case) rather than Europe.

Such speculations are necessarily idle, but I may at least point out that the conception of a “senseless spirit” is quite unwarranted, since we are coming more and more to feel that the universe itself is a sentient being. Perhaps motion rather than standing still will be a characteristic of the spirit, and one of the pleasures of a bodiless angel will be to revolve like a proton around a nucleus at the speed of twenty or thirty thousand revolutions a second. There may be a keen delight in that, more fascinating than a ride on a Coney Island scenic railway. It will certainly be a kind of sensation. Or perhaps the bodiless angel will dart like light or cosmic rays in ethereal waves around curved space at the rate of 183,000 miles per second. There must still be spiritual pigments for the angels to paint and enjoy some form of creation, ethereal vibrations for the angels to feel as tone and sound and color, and ethereal breeze to brush against the angels’ cheeks. Otherwise spirit itself would stagnate like water in a cesspool, or feel like men on a hot, suffocating summer afternoon without a whiff of fresh air. There must still be motion and emotion (in whatever form) if there is to be life; certainly not complete rest and insensit