“From physics, we’re all familiar with the law of conservation of matter. Now, this raises the question: What is included—or not—in the concept of ‘matter’? Water is matter even if it’s converted to steam. Every gas is still matter, quantitatively measureable, even if it’s very volatile. So that must allow us to assume that completely dematerialized materials—so to speak—also exist in limited amounts, even if they’re so dematerialized they can’t be measured by the means available. What I’m talking about is the soul. In our Christian faith, it too is a substance inhabiting the living body, which it leaves when the body dies. You can see that in the frescoes of monastery chapels, but not just there; it’s also expressed in the fact that at the head of graves in burial grounds of very early times, they erected poles, not crosses: tall wooden poles and later stone stelae, as the first thing the soul just escaped its body could shinny up, so to speak. And what’s more, they planted trees nearby, as though souls were birds that could perch in them. You get the impression that the soul of a recently deceased person first had to become accustomed to the new element of freedom after departing the cage of the body. I mean, it can’t just take off at the drop of a hat. Many can’t do it at first. Instead, they flutter around nearby for years or decades—some even for centuries, if you believe the ghost stories you’ve heard—but time doesn’t make any difference to them. They can haunt the place until we’ve become spooks ourselves. Personally, I myself have never encountered a ghost (leaving aside my first wife, but at least she was still alive, even if really terrifying). However, they say that Putzi Cottolenghi actually moped around for years after he died. They had to sell the house, one of the most beautiful palazzi in Ferrara. He’s said to have behaved obnoxiously and already fallen out with his entire family while he was still alive; they were furious with him because of the inheritance—or rather, because there wasn’t any—he’d spent it all. But despite that, I don’t believe in spiritualism and the kind of humbug you told me about in your Viennese relatives, or what that Nostitz woman was up to in Vienna and God knows who else from society in other places. They all fell for Blavatsky and she was an out-and-out fraud—that’s been proven in the meantime. But what I wanted to say was this: it can’t be that easy to sum up all the souls of the dead. Just think about it: since the beginning of mankind—and that means for millions of years, as science has now shown—souls are supposed to have left their bodies and floated around freely in space, billions and billions of souls. Now I ask you: even if they’re dematerialized and not a measurable substance, there must be something there that’s released and then accumulates somehow. Our churches teach that the soul first goes through purgatory and then to heaven or hell, and you can see that too, very vividly depicted, in the frescoes of monastery chapels and in primitive art in general; but even if you think of the Kingdom of God—I mean the one in the hereafter, right?—as being infinite, it seems to me there’s a hardly believable quantitative discrepancy.