Part 4

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, 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 of thoughts independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is almost certain that an intellect devoid of senses, devoid of organs to create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which derived from our sensibility all that gave it life.

XIII

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE

This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of its destruction, this ego is neither our mind nor our body, since we recognize that both are waves that flow away and are renewed incessantly. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or substance, for these are always in evolution, nor life, which is the cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for us to apprehend or define it, to tell where it dwells. When we try to go back to its last source, we find hardly more than a succession of memories, a series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled, attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. "As an English poet has very truly said, that which clamours aloud for eternity is the very part of me that will perish."

It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively, that every reality of our life disappears before this phantom. It is a matter of utter indifference to us that throughout eternity our body or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air, star; it is likewise indifferent to us that our intellect should expand until it mixes with the life of the worlds, understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a few almost always insignificant facts accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.

"I care not," says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand nothing. "I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses: they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centre wherein lies the sensitive point which I feel to be all myself. They are now set loose, floating in space and time, and their fate is as unknown to me as that of the most distant constellations. Anything that occurs exists for me only upon condition that I be able to recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and precisely nowhere, which I turn like a mirror about this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it."

Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is supplied by our senses; and even the images and words--which in reality are but images--by the aid of which it strives to tear itself from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could that mind remain what it was when there is nothing left to it of that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall it carry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows itself only by grace of that body? A few memories of a life in common? Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space and in unlimited time?

XIV

THE SAME, CONTINUED

"But," I shall be told, "there is more in us than the intellect discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not placed there; we contain a being superior to the one we know."

That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by unconsciousness, that is to say, by that which represents the universe, is enormous and preponderant. But how shall the ego which we know and whose destiny alone concerns us recognize all those things and that superior being whom it has never known? What will it do in the presence of that stranger? If I be told that stranger is myself, I will readily agree; but was that which upon earth felt and measured my joys and sorrows and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was that this unmoved, unseen stranger who existed in me without my cognizance, even as I am probably about to live in him without his concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the pitiful recollection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater consciousness, all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my head, not even brushing with their new wings that which I feel myself to be to-day?

IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOT BE DREADFUL

It seems, therefore, that a survival with our present consciousness is as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were admissible, it would not be dreadful. It is certain that, when the body disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time; for we cannot imagine a soul suffering in a body which it no longer possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well, spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our soul feels the reaction of the sufferings of our body, or of the bodies that surround it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection, shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, treachery, personal humiliations, as well as the afflictions and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire the sting that hurts it only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own sorrow, which is the sorrow of not knowing, the soul, once delivered from its body, could suffer only at the recollection of that body. It is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But, in the eyes of that which no longer counts the days, those troubles will seem so brief that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.

The soul is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits, when one is no longer bound by space and time, is already to transcend them.

XVI

THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS

There remains but the survival without consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of to-day.

A survival without consciousness seems at first sight the most probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most consistent with the present state of human thought, to set that limit to their anxiety there. They have nothing to dread; for every fear, if any remain, would, if we look into it carefully, deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished, scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without dreams and without awakening.

But this is only a solution that flatters indolence. If we press those who speak of a survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of consciousness to persist in infinity.

Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that of the universe into which their own will fall. But that means solving very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a man's brain.

XVII

THE SAME, CONTINUED

This question is closely allied to our modified consciousness. There is for the moment no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.

Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad expectation that greets a birth. If, before being born, we were permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and a life that should not be completed by the magnificent hour of death, which of us, knowing what we ought to know, would accept the disquieting problem of an existence that would not end in the reassuring mystery of its conclusion? Which of us would care to come into a world where there is so little to learn, if he did not know that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best part of life is that it prepares this hour for us, that it is the one and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that incomparable mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be possible, because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where the worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we count among the number of the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost unimaginable that a thought can survive to mingle with the substance of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a waste of indifference, can be nothing but a sea of joy.