that death causes as much alteration in the condition and situation of the
individual as the bursting of a rose-bud causes in the condition and situa-
tion of a ®ower.”^33 Such vexing inconsistencies of interpretation become
moot, however, when we realize that Whitman was not so much con-
cerned with ideology or scienti¤c probability as with projecting the glow-
ing imagery of a scenario of his own perpetual continuity.
The dead persona’s retention of his unimpaired mental and emotional
faculties is, of course, a masterpiece of wish ful¤llment. For mind and soul,
it has been pointed out, are not “substantial” words referring to things
that can be objectively demonstrated, but because they are essentially ver-
bal constructs they can be imagined and described. And in this sense, they
can be conceived and realized by the artist.^34 Whitman’s dif¤culty in por-
traying a postmortal self and a postmortal milieu was hardly unique. Un-
like some religious thinkers, he did not separate his Self into its before-
death and its after-death manifestations but stressed the continuity of his
personality. The rationale by which he endows the supposedly dead per-
sona with mortal attributes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is very close to
the reasoning of many contemporary spiritualists and religious idealists.
“If the religious ideas expressed by many spiritualists tended to dissolve
the personality of God,” says R. Lawrence Moore, “they had not similar
effects on the concept of human individuality. [These concepts] main-
tained a ¤rm insistence on the uniqueness of the individual soul before
and after death.”^35
An intriguing modern interpretation of the sort of consciousness that
Whitman attributes to the disembodied persona is contained in John
Hick’s essay “The Survival of the Disembodied Mind.” Hick ventures the
idea that one’s postmortem perceptions may be comparable to the visions
one sees in dreams. Any possible state of consciousness in the afterlife, he
conjectures,
will be mind-dependent, and will be formed out of mental images
acquired during one’s embodied life. These will include images of
one’s own body as seen by oneself and of a surrounding material
environment. The result will, from the experient’s point of view,
be the perception of a “real” and solid world in which he exists as
a bodily being. The world may however differ from our present
world in the kinds of way in which the sequence and arrange-
ment of events in our dreams is liable to differ from that of wak-“The Progress of Souls” / 119