fire, the memory lives in the heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart, but also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the very background of life the great image upon which their eyes linger in consolation or despair.

X

WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN
INTO WHICH DEATH HURLS US,
LET US FIRST PUT RELIGIOUS
FEARS FROM OUR MINDS

There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us not delay in putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not one of them brings us a proof before which a candid intelligence can bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things, that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty? He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less uncertain. If not by our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some æsthetic or sentimental hazard? Or has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us, we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of its Author.

XI

ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE

Here we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific certainty to break through its darkness—for man has the right to hope for that which he does not yet conceive—the only point that interests us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.

Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this world.

Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exist, under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyze it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny. It is as contrary to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any case—and this is what matters here—if nothingness were possible, since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.

XII

THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS

Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached this question in an essay on Immortality,[2] of which I will only reproduce an essential passage, contenting myself with supporting it with a few new considerations.

What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into the centre of the universe, the only point that matters in space and time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or