laws of heredity, atavism, natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern opposition between the conception of function and the conception of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective character of individual consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution, do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some extent approving one’s own annihilation, 477