Methuen’s Shilling Novels

      1 The Mighty Atom                                  Marie Corelli
      2 Jane                                             Marie Corelli
      3 Boy                                              Marie Corelli
      4 Spanish Gold                                  G. A. Birmingham
      5 The Search Party                              G. A. Birmingham
      6 Teresa of Watling Street                        Arnold Bennett
      9 The Unofficial Honeymoon                         Dolf Wyllarde
     12 The Demon                           C. N. and A. M. Williamson
     17 Joseph                                             Frank Danby
     18 Round the Red Lamp                          Sir A. Conan Doyle
     20 Light Freights                                    W. W. Jacobs
     22 The Long Road                                     John Oxenham
     71 The Gates of Wrath                              Arnold Bennett
     72 Short Cruises                                     W. W. Jacobs
     81 The Card                                        Arnold Bennett
     87 Lalage’s Lovers                               G. A. Birmingham
     92 White Fang                                         Jack London
    105 The Wallet of Kai Lung                           Ernest Bramah
    108 The Adventures of Dr. Whitty                  G. A. Birmingham
    113 Lavender and Old Lace                              Myrtle Reed
    115 Old Rose and Silver                                Myrtle Reed
    122 The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton     E. Phillips Oppenheim
    125 The Regent                                      Arnold Bennett
    127 Sally                                         Dorothea Conyers
    129 The Lodger                                 Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
    135 A Spinner in the Sun                               Myrtle Reed
    137 The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu                        Sax Rohmer
    139 The Golden Centipede                             Louise Gerard
    140 The Love Pirate                     C. N. and A. M. Williamson
    142 The Way of these Women                   E. Phillips Oppenheim
    143 Sandy Married                                 Dorothea Conyers
    145 Chance                                           Joseph Conrad
    148 Flower of the Dusk                                 Myrtle Reed
    150 The Gentleman Adventurer                          H. C. Bailey
    154 The Hyena of Kallu                               Louise Gerard
    190 The Happy Hunting Ground                     Mrs. Alice Perrin
    191 My Lady of Shadows                                John Oxenham
    211 Max Carrados                                     Ernest Bramah
    212 Under Western Eyes                               Joseph Conrad
    213 The Kloof Bride                               Ernest Glanville
    215 Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo                  E. Phillips Oppenheim
    216 The Wonder of Love                              E. M. Albanesi
    217 A Weaver of Dreams                                 Myrtle Reed
    219 The Family                                     Elinor Mordaunt
    220 A Heritage of Peril                            A. W. Marchmont
    221 The Kinsman                                      Mrs. Sidgwick
    222 Emmanuel Burden                                 Hilaire Belloc
    224 Broken Shackles                                   John Oxenham
    225 A Knight of Spain                               Marjorie Bowen
    227 Byeways                                         Robert Hichens
    228 Gossamer                                      G. A. Birmingham
    229 My Friend the Chauffeur             C. N. and A. M. Williamson
    230 The Salving of a Derelict                        Maurice Drake
    231 Cameos                                           Marie Corelli
    232 The Happy Valley                                  B. M. Croker
    233 Victory                                          Joseph Conrad

A Selection only.

Methuen’s Shilling Library

     36 De Profundis                                       Oscar Wilde
     37 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime                         Oscar Wilde
     38 Selected Poems                                     Oscar Wilde
     39 An Ideal Husband                                   Oscar Wilde
     40 Intentions                                         Oscar Wilde
     41 Lady Windermere’s Fan                              Oscar Wilde
     42 Charmides and other Poems                          Oscar Wilde
     43 Harvest Home                                       E. V. Lucas
     44 A Little of Everything                             E. V. Lucas
     45 Vailima Letters                         Robert Louis Stevenson
     46 Hills and the Sea                               Hilaire Belloc
     47 The Blue Bird                              Maurice Maeterlinck
     50 Charles Dickens                               G. K. Chesterton
     53 Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to
          his Son                                George Horace Lorimer
     54 The Life of John Ruskin                      W. G. Collingwood
     57 Sevastopol and other Stories                       Leo Tolstoy
     58 The Lore of the Honey-Bee                     Tickner Edwardes
     60 From Midshipman to Field Marshal               Sir Evelyn Wood
     62 John Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu                   John Boyes
     63 Oscar Wilde                                     Arthur Ransome
     64 The Vicar of Morwenstow                        S. Baring-Gould
     65 Old Country Life                               S. Baring-Gould
     76 Home Life in France                          M. Betham-Edwards
     77 Selected Prose                                     Oscar Wilde
     78 The Best of Lamb                                   E. V. Lucas
     80 Selected Letters                        Robert Louis Stevenson
     83 Reason and Belief                             Sir Oliver Lodge
     85 The Importance of Being Earnest                    Oscar Wilde
     91 Social Evils and their Remedy                      Leo Tolstoy
     93 The Substance of Faith                        Sir Oliver Lodge
     94 All Things Considered                         G. K. Chesterton
     95 The Mirror of the Sea                            Joseph Conrad
     96 A Picked Company                                Hilaire Belloc
    116 The Survival of Man                           Sir Oliver Lodge
    126 Science from an Easy Chair                   Sir Ray Lankester
    141 Variety Lane                                       E. V. Lucas
    144 A Shilling for my Thoughts                    G. K. Chesterton
    146 A Woman of No Importance                           Oscar Wilde
    149 A Shepherd’s Life                                 W. H. Hudson
    193 On Nothing                                      Hilaire Belloc
    200 Jane Austen and her Times                         G. E. Mitton
    214 Select Essays                              Maurice Maeterlinck
    223 Two Generations                                    Leo Tolstoy
    226 On Everything                                   Hilaire Belloc
    234 Records and Reminiscences                  Sir Francis Burnand

A Selection only.

GLEANINGS FROM MAETERLINCK

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

    THE BLUE BIRD
    OUR ETERNITY
    DEATH
    MARY MAGDALENE
    THE UNKNOWN GUEST
    THE WRACK OF THE STORM
    THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
    WISDOM AND DESTINY
    THE LIFE OF THE BEE
    THE BURIED TEMPLE
    THE DOUBLE GARDEN
    LIFE AND FLOWERS
    AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
    MONNA VANNA
    JOYZELLE
    SISTER BEATRICE; AND ARIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
    MY DOG
    OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS
    HOURS OF GLADNESS

                             GLEANINGS FROM
                               MAETERLINCK

                       TRANSLATED AND COMPILED BY
                      ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

                           METHUEN & CO. LTD.
                          36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
                                 LONDON

                        _First Published in 1917_

                          _All rights reserved_

               _Copyright U.S.A. by Dodd, Mead & Co. Inc.
                             1913 to 1917._

INTRODUCTION

In the first act of _The Blue Bird_, the fairy Bérylune sends Mytyl
and Tyltyl in search of happiness. Shepherded and protected by Light,
they explore the Past and the Future, the Palace of Night, the Kingdoms
of the Dead and of the Unborn. At one moment they find themselves in
a graveyard; and Mytyl grows fearful at her first contact with the
great mystery of Death. Yet the graveyard with its wooden crosses and
grass-covered mounds is moonlit and tranquil; and of a sudden, as the
revealing diamond is turned in Tyltyl’s fingers, even the tombstones
and ‘all the grand investiture of death’ disappear, to be replaced by
luxuriant, swaying clusters of Madonna lilies.

“Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl, in amazement, searching in the grass
for traces of even one tombstone.

Her brother also looks:

“There are no dead,” is his reply.

Any one who was present on the first night of the play at the Haymarket
Theatre, in 1909, will not easily forget the audience’s little gasp of
delighted surprise. Yet the two lines of dialogue were more than a stage
effect, more than an aspect of mysticism; almost they may be regarded
as the essence of Maeterlinck’s later work. Since the _Life of the
Bee_, since the earlier essays and such pure drama as _Monna Vanna_,
_The Blind_ and _Pelléas and Mélisande_, his mind seems to have been
brooding more and more on the part which Death, the great twin mystery
of the world, plays in the life of man and of the race. In _The Death of
Tintagiles_ there is a barred and studded door, through which, for all
its studs and bars, there steals a miasma of dread. And, when the door
opens, it is to release a spirit of annihilation which the concerted
efforts of Tintagiles’ sisters can neither restrain nor force back.

In _The Blue Bird_ we are shown that a man cannot die so long as
he dwells in the memory of those who loved him. In his latest work
Maeterlinck gives to the dead an objective existence. In part each
generation survives its own death and transmits to its successors the
heritage of aspiration and achievement, of knowledge and passion, which
it has received from its predecessors; in greater part the objective
existence is founded on new modes of communication, a new study of
psychic relationship and a new belief in a subliminal state.

I have collected in the present volume a selection of essays illustrating
the later stages of Maeterlinck’s quest. Never in history have so
many women and men, stricken suddenly and without warning, sought so
unanimously and painfully to penetrate the veil wherein the world’s
oldest mystery is shrouded. The finality of death was a challenge flung
down and eagerly taken up by all whom the loss of son or brother had
taken unawares. To Maeterlinck the war has brought in great part the
annihilation of a people, his own people; it has inspired him to a
splendour of indignation and pity; but, more gravely and urgently than
ever before, it has demanded of him an answer to the question of the
Sadducees, who “say there is no resurrection.”

Readers wishing to study the complete series of essays from which the
sixteen in this volume are taken will find them in the three books
entitled, _Our Eternity_, _The Unknown Guest_ and _The Wrack of the
Storm_, all of which are issued by the present publishers.

                                             ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

CHELSEA, _9 April 1917_

CONTENTS

                                              PAGE

          INTRODUCTION                         vii

       I. OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH                13

      II. ANNIHILATION                          31

     III. COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD          37

      IV. OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS            63

       V. THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY           75

      VI. OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES          89

     VII. CONCLUSIONS                          105

    VIII. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE          115

      IX. HEROISM                              181

       X. ON RE-READING THUCYDIDES             193

      XI. THE DEAD DO NOT DIE                  205

    XII. IN MEMORIAM                           213

    XIII. THE LIFE OF THE DEAD                 217

    XIV. THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS              225

    XV. THE WILL OF EARTH                      237

    XVI. WHEN THE WAR IS OVER                  247

OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH

1

It has been well said:

“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some
vague future or survival, where we shall not be. It is our own end; and
everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk
to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish
spell of number; do not talk to me—to me who am to die outright—of
societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration,
save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast,
show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech
and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death!”[1]

2

That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press around
it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it but
thrives upon our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled
with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything
with its shadow. But though we think of death incessantly, we do so
unconsciously, without learning to know death. We compel our attention
to turn its back upon it, instead of going to it with uplifted head.
All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting
our will from it. We deliver it into the groping hands of instinct and
we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the
idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous
of ideas—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the
flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one
power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by
gleams kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive.
We do not begin to think of death until we have no longer the strength,
I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among us
from another century would have difficulty in recognizing, in the depths
of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of his love
or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything has changed
around it and when even that which composes it and upon which it depends
has vanished, he would find almost untouched, rough-drawn as it was by
our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago. Our intelligence,
grown so bold and active, has not worked upon this figure, has not, so to
speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the
tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical among
us are still steeped in the appalling mystery of the Hebrew Sheol, the
pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it may no longer be lighted
by very definite flames, the gulf still opens at the end of life and, if
less known, is all the more formidable. And therefore, when the impending
hour strikes to which we dared not raise our eyes, everything fails us
at the same time. Those two or three uncertain ideas whereon, without
examining them, we had meant to lean give way like rushes beneath the
weight of the last minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among reflections
which are illusive or are strange to us and which do not know the roads
to our heart. No one awaits us on the last shore where all is unprepared,
where naught remains afoot save terror.

3

Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says:

“It is not worthy of a Christian”—and I would add, of a man—“to postpone
his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him
off.”

It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death in
the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and stand by
it. He would say to death:

“I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when my
eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you were not: that is enough
to prevent you from becoming mine.”

He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a tried image against which the
last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes
would draw fresh comfort. Instead of the terrible prayer of the dying,
which is the prayer of the depths, he would say his own prayer, that
of the peaks of his existence, where would be gathered, like angels of
peace, the most lucid, the most rarefied thoughts of his life. Is not
that the prayer of prayers? After all, what is a true and worthy prayer,
if not the most ardent and disinterested effort to reach and grasp the
unknown?

4

“The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making
death grievous.”

And Bacon wrote:

“_Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa._”

Let us, then, learn to look upon death as it is in itself, free from
the horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination.
Let us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
Thus we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is not
just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They
form part of life and not of death. We readily forget the most cruel
sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of convalescence
destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of pain. But let
death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before
it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of
pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of
the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly
prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts a term to
them.

5

In point of fact, whereas sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the
agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. Now
what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and especially the
last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching
during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked,
disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of everything, into an unknown
that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has
ever felt.

It is doubly unjust to impute the torments of that second to death.
We shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would
remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown
into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most
dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the
watchers, at least; for very often the consciousness of him whom death,
in Bossuet’s phrase, has “brought to bay” is already greatly dulled and
perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it
seems to be enduring. All doctors consider it their first duty to prolong
to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hopeless agony.
Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, twenty times wished and not
once dared to throw himself at their feet and implore them to show mercy?
They are filled with so great a certainty and the duty which they obey
leaves so little room for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded
by tears, curb their revolt and recoil before a law which all recognize
and revere as the highest law of man’s conscience.

6

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarous. Its roots go down
to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
long since died out in the intelligence of men. That is why the doctors
act as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded that
every minute gained amid the most intolerable sufferings is snatched from
the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the mysteries of the
hereafter reserve for men; and of two evils, to avoid that which they
know to be imaginary, they choose the only real one. Besides, in thus
postponing the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best
part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which
makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation
of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death
demanding the prolongation of the agony.

7

The doctors, on their side, say or might say that, in the present stage
of science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty
of death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
insupportable torments, might be murder. Doubtless there is not one
chance in a hundred thousand that the patient escape. No matter: if that
chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a few days,
or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not be the real life,
but much rather, as the Romans called it, “an extended death,” those
hundred thousand useless torments will not have been in vain. A single
hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Here we have, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if
we mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
we see with all that remains to us, that is to say, with every imaginable
pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts and
which is heavy enough to raise by a hair’s-breadth the other scale that
dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of
another world.

8

Swollen by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes such
that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors’ reasons. And yet there
is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are
slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least
to dull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do
so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure
out niggardly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish
and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance,
that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life
refusing to give place to on-coming rest.

It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring.
It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death.
It happens before it and beneath it. It is not the arrival of death but
the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death but life that
we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it is life that
wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten from every side at the approach of
death, but not at its call; and, though they gather round it, they did
not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the fatigue that oppresses you
if you do not yield to it? All those strugglings, those waitings, those
tossings, those tragic cursings are on the side of the slope to which
we cling and not on the other side. They are, indeed, accidental and
temporary and emanate only from our ignorance. All our knowledge merely
helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer
hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act
with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently every
evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the sick
man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no physical nor
metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be as salutary as
that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be nothing else to take into
consideration, it will be possible to surround death with profounder
ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death
once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon
it without fear and to lighten that which comes after.

9

Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The
first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our
mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful.
The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first.

Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing it
the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that digs
our graves and orders us to keep that which is made to disappear? If we
cannot think without horror of what befalls the beloved in the grave, is
it death or we that placed him there? Because death carries the spirit
to some place unknown, shall we reproach it with our bestowal of the
body which it leaves with us? Death descends into our midst to change
the place of a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does
and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. For it is
already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to
prolong to the very utmost, as though we were persuaded that it is our
only security against forgetfulness. I am well aware that, from any
other than the human point of view, this proceeding is very innocent;
and that, looked upon from a sufficient height, decomposing flesh is no
more repulsive than a fading flower or a crumbling stone. But, when all
is said, it offends our senses, shocks our memory, daunts our courage,
whereas it would be so easy for us to avoid the foul ordeal. Purified
by fire, the remembrance lives enthroned 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
ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger
in consolation or despair.

10

There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time 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 an honest 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 of them
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 whose
doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest
and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story,
which, even if scientifically substantiated, would be merely a beautiful
lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles
no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that
creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith,
vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough
to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any
other, he knew the stock proofs of the theologians, for they had been
the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs
could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four
most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to mankind, must have given
it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments,
whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he
glories and, in a manner, rejoices in their futility:

“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for
their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give
a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a
foolishness, _stultitiam_; and then you complain that they do not prove
it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in
being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”

His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and
devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the
universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for
which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:

“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery
itself is incomprehensible to man.”

He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by
an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more
serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another,
small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which
it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a
fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In
the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller
to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the
smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries
his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an
amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries
which he cultivates or on which he dwells.

To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him;
and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the
monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair
of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion
with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist.
We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He
does not exist.

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having
neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore
incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”

God is or is not.

“But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it.
There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the
uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or
tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one
or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either.”

The correct course would be not to wager at all.

“Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are
launched in it.”

Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for
which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering,
at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small
pleasures, a few wretched comforts of this life, because your little
sacrifice will not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity
of unspeakable happiness.

“‘It is true, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.’

“Never mind, follow the way in which they began who believe and who at
first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc.
That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of
the beasts.”

“‘But that is just what I am afraid of.’

“Why? What have you to lose?”

Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument
to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that
human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands
our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our
choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some
æsthetic or sentimental pitch-and-toss? 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 this 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 is rejected by that best and most divine part which He
has implanted 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 that
injustice may load us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal
presence of its Author.

II

ANNIHILATION

1

And now 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 is the vaster by all that we have
learned 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 in the universal
consciousness, or with a consciousness different from that which we
possess in this world.

2

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 exists, under whatever form,
it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to analyse 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 illumine, 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 escapes our senses or our
reason and exists without our knowledge.

3

But, it will perhaps be said, though the annihilation of every world
and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is
impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothingness and
everlasting death? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by
words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness.
We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we
believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to
recognize that our idea of death is much too puerile to contain the least
truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the
destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has
a life a little different from ours. Even so do we act towards a world
that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because
we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is
extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learned
that the most inert matter, to outward seeming, is animated by movements
so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than
sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable
energy locked up in a wayside stone.

“There is no room for death!” cried Emily Brontë.

But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should
really become inert and motionless, it would none the less persist under
one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility,
would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All
that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as
that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw
us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible
than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands,
the less comprehensible do nothingness and death 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.

COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE DEAD

1

The spiritualists communicate or think that they communicate with the
dead by means of what they call automatic speech and writing. These are
obtained by the agency of a medium[2] in a state of ecstasy, or rather
“trance,” to employ the vocabulary of the new science. This condition
is not one of hypnotic sleep, nor does it seem to be an hysterical
manifestation; it is often associated, as in the case of the medium
Mrs. Piper, with perfect health and complete intellectual and physical
balance. It is rather the more or less voluntary emergence of a second or
subliminal personality or consciousness of the medium; or, if we admit
the spiritualistic hypothesis, his occupation, his “psychic invasion,” as
Myers calls it, by forces from another world. In the “entranced” subject,
the normal consciousness and personality are entirely done away with;
and he replies “automatically,” sometimes by word of mouth, more often
in writing, to the questions put to him. It has happened that he speaks
and writes simultaneously, his voice being occupied by one spirit and
his hand by another, who thus carry on two independent conversations.
More rarely, the voice and the two hands are “possessed” at one and the
same time; and we receive three different communications. Obviously,
manifestations of this sort lend themselves, to frauds and impostures of
all kinds; and the distrust aroused is at first invincible. But there
are some that make their appearance encompassed with such guarantees of
good faith and sincerity, so often, so long and so rigorously checked by
scientific men of unimpeachable character and authority and of originally
inflexible scepticism, that it becomes difficult to maintain a suspicion
at the finish.[3] Unfortunately, I am not able to enter here into the
details of some of these purely scientific sittings, those for instance
of Mrs. Piper, the famous medium with whom F. W. H. Myers, Richard
Hodgson, Professor Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, Sir Oliver
Lodge and William James worked during a number of years. On the other
hand, it is precisely the accumulation and coincidences of these abnormal
details which gradually produce and confirm the conviction that we are in
the presence of an entirely new, improbable but genuine phenomenon, which
is sometimes difficult of classification among exclusively terrestrial
phenomena. I should have to devote to these “communications” a special
study which would exceed the limits of this essay; and I will therefore
content myself with referring those who care to know more of the subject
to Sir Oliver Lodge’s book, _The Survival of Man_; and, above all, to the
twenty-five bulky volumes of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R., notably to
the report and comments of William James on the Piper-Hodgson sittings
in Vol. XXIII. and to Vol. XIII., where Hodgson examines the facts and
arguments that may be adduced for or against the agency of the dead; and,
lastly, to Myers’ great work, _Human Personality and its Survival after
Bodily Death_.

2

The “entranced” mediums are invaded or possessed by different familiar
spirits to whom the new science gives the somewhat inappropriate and
ambiguous name of “controls.” Thus, Mrs. Piper is visited in succession
by Phinuit, George Pelham, or “G.P.,” Imperator, Doctor and Rector. Mrs.
Thompson, another very celebrated medium, has Nelly for her usual tenant,
while graver and more illustrious personages would take possession of
Stainton Moses, a clergyman. Each of these spirits retains a sharply
defined character, which is consistent throughout and which, moreover,
for the most part bears no relation to that of the medium. Amongst these,
Phinuit and Nelly are undoubtedly the most attractive, the most original,
the most living, the most active and, above all, the most talkative.
They centralize the communications after a fashion; they come and go
officiously; and, should any one of those present wish to be brought
into touch with the soul of a deceased relative or friend, they fly in
search of it, find it amid the invisible throng, usher it in, announce
its presence, speak in its name, transmit and, so to speak, translate
the questions and replies; for it seems that it is very difficult for the
dead to communicate with the living and that they need special aptitudes
and a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances. We will not yet examine
what they have to reveal to us; but to see them thus fluttering to and
fro amid the multitude of their discarnate brothers and sisters gives
us a first impression of the next world which is none too reassuring;
and we say to ourselves that the dead of to-day are strangely like those
whom Ulysses conjured up out of the Cimmerian darkness three thousand
years ago: pale and empty shades, bewildered, incoherent, puerile and
terror-stricken, like unto dreams, more numerous than the leaves that
fall in autumn and, like them, trembling in the unknown winds from the
vast plains of the other world. They no longer even have enough life to
be unhappy; and they seem to drag out, we know not where, a precarious
and idle existence, to wander aimlessly, to hover round us, slumbering,
or chattering among one another of the minor matters of this world; and,
when a gap is made in their darkness, to hasten from all sides, like
flocks of famished birds, hungering for light and the sound of a human
voice. And, in spite of ourselves, we think of the _Odyssey_ and the
sinister words of the shade of Achilles as it issued from Erebus:

“Do not, O illustrious Ulysses, speak to me of death; I would wish, being
on earth, to serve for hire with another man of no estate, who had not
much livelihood, rather than rule over all the departed dead.”

3

What have these latterday dead to tell us? To begin with, it is a
remarkable thing that they appear to be much more interested in events
here below than in those of the world wherein they move. They seem, above
all, jealous to establish their identity, to prove that they still exist,
that they recognize us, that they know everything; and, to convince us
of this, they enter into the most minute and forgotten details with
extraordinary precision, perspicacity and prolixity. They are also
extremely clever at unravelling the intricate family connections of the
person actually questioning them, of any of the sitters, or even of a
stranger entering the room. They recall this one’s little infirmities,
that one’s maladies, the eccentricities or personal tendencies of a
third. They have cognizance of events taking place at a distance:
they see, for instance, and describe to their hearers in London an
insignificant episode in Canada. In a word, they say and do almost all
the disconcerting and inexplicable things that are sometimes obtained
from a first-rate medium; perhaps they even go a little further; but
there comes from it all no breath, no glimmer of the hereafter, not even
the something vaguely promised and vaguely waited for.

We shall be told that the mediums are visited only by inferior spirits,
incapable of tearing themselves from earthly cares and soaring towards
greater and loftier ideas. It is possible; and no doubt we are wrong to
believe that a spirit stripped of its body can suddenly be transformed
and reach, in a moment, the level of our imaginings; but could they not
at least inform us where they are, what they feel and what they do?

4

And now it seems that death itself has elected to answer these
objections. Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson and William James, who so
often, for long and ardent hours, questioned Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson
and obliged the departed to speak by their mouths, are now themselves
among the shades, on the other side of the curtain of darkness. They
at least knew exactly what to do in order to reach us, what to reveal
in order to allay the uneasy curiosity of men. Myers in particular,
the most ardent, the most convinced, the most impatient of the veil
that parted him from the eternal realities, formally promised those who
were continuing his work that he would make every imaginable effort out
yonder, in the unknown, to come to their aid in a decisive fashion.
He kept his word. A month after his death, when Sir Oliver Lodge was
questioning Mrs. Thompson in her trance, Nelly, the medium’s familiar
spirit, suddenly declared that she had seen Myers, that he was not yet
fully awake, but that he hoped to come, at nine o’clock in the evening,
and “communicate” with his old friend of the Psychical Society.

The sitting was suspended and resumed at half past eight; and Myers’
“communication” was at last obtained. He was recognized by the first
few words he spoke; it was really he; he had not changed, Faithful to
his idiosyncracy when on earth, he at once insisted on the necessity
for taking notes. But he seemed dazed. They spoke to him of the Society
for Psychical Research, the sole interest of his life. He had lost all
recollection of it. Then memory gradually revived; and there followed
a quantity of post-mortem gossip on the subject of the society’s next
president, the obituary article in the _Times_, the letters that should
be published and so on. He complained that people would not let him rest,
that there was not a place in England where they did not ask for him:

“Call Myers! Bring Myers!”

He ought to be given time to collect himself, to reflect. He also
complained of the difficulty of conveying his ideas through the
mediums: “they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines
of Virgil.”[4] As for his present condition, “he groped his way as if
through passages, before he knew he was dead. He thought he had lost his
way in a strange town ... and, even when he saw people that he knew were
dead, he thought they were only visions.”

This, together with more chatter of a no less trivial nature, is about
all that we obtained from Myers’ “control” or “impersonation,” of which
better things had been expected. The “communication” and many others
which, it appears, recall in a striking fashion Myers’ habits, character
and ways of thinking and speaking would possess some value if none of
those by whom or to whom they were made had been acquainted with him at
the time when he was still numbered among the living. As they stand, they
are most probably but reminiscences of a secondary personality of the
medium or unconscious suggestions of the questioner or the sitters.

5

A more important communication and a more perplexing, because of the
names connected with it, is that which is known as “Mrs. Piper’s
Hodgson-Control.” Professor William James devotes an account of over
a hundred and twenty pages to it in Vol. XXIII. of the _Proceedings_.
Dr. Hodgson, in his lifetime, was secretary of the American branch of
the S.P.R., of which William James was vice-president. For many years,
he devoted himself to Mrs. Piper the medium, working with her twice a
week and thus accumulating an enormous mass of documents on the subject
of posthumous manifestations, a mass whose wealth has not yet been
exhausted. Like Myers, he had promised to come back after his death;
and, in his jovial way, he had more than once declared to Mrs. Piper
that, when he came to visit her in his turn, as he had more experience
than the other spirits, the sittings would take a more decisive shape
and that “he would make it hot for them.” He did come back, a week after
his death, and manifested himself by automatic writing (which, with Mrs.
Piper as medium, was the most usual method of communication) during
several sittings at which William James was present. I should like to
give an idea of these manifestations. But, as the celebrated Harvard
professor very truly observes, the shorthand report of a sitting of this
kind at once alters its aspect from start to finish. We seek in vain
for the emotion experienced on thus finding yourself in the presence of
an invisible but living being, who not only answers your questions, but
anticipates your thoughts, understands before you have finished speaking,
grasps an allusion and caps it with another allusion, grave or smiling.
The life of the dead man, which, during a strange hour, had, so to speak,
surrounded and penetrated you, seems to be extinguished for the second
time. Stenography, which is devoid of all emotion, no doubt supplies the
best elements for arriving at a logical conclusion; but it is not certain
that here, as in many other cases where the unknown predominates, logic
is the only road that leads to the truth.

“When I first undertook,” says William James, “to collate this series of
sittings and make the present report, I supposed that my verdict would be
determined by pure logic. Certain minute incidents, I thought, ought to
make for spirit-return or against it in a ‘crucial’ way. But watching my
mind work as it goes over the data, convinces me that exact logic plays
only a preparatory part in shaping our conclusions here; and that the
decisive vote, if there be one, has to be cast by what I may call one’s
general sense of dramatic probability, which sense ebbs and flows from
one hypothesis to another—it does so in the present writer at least—in
a rather illogical manner. If one sticks to the detail, one may draw an
anti-spiritist conclusion; if one thinks more of what the whole mass may
signify, one may well incline to spiritist interpretations.”[5]

And, at the end of his article, he sums up in the following words:

“_I myself feel as if an external will to communicate were probably
there_, that is, I find myself doubting, in consequence of my whole
acquaintance with that sphere of phenomena, that Mrs. Piper’s dream-life,
even equipped with ‘telepathic’ powers, accounts for all the results
found. But if asked whether the will to communicate be Hodgson’s, or be
some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await
more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty
or a hundred years.”[6]

As we see, William James is inclined to waver; and at certain points in
his account he appears to waver still more and indeed to say deliberately
that the spirits “have a finger in the pie.” These hesitations on the
part of a man who has revolutionized our psychological ideas and who
possessed a brain as wonderfully organized and well-balanced as that
of our own Taine, for instance, are very significant. As a doctor
of medicine and a professor of philosophy, sceptical by nature and
scrupulously faithful to experimental methods, he was thrice qualified to
conduct investigations of this kind to a successful conclusion. It is not
a question of allowing ourselves, in our turn, to be unduly influenced
by those hesitations; but, in any case, they show that the problem is
a serious one, the gravest, perhaps, if the facts were beyond dispute,
which we have had to solve since the coming of Christ; and that we must
not expect to dismiss it with a shrug or a laugh.

6

I am obliged, for lack of space, to refer those who wish to form an
opinion of their own on the “Piper-Hodgson” case to the text of the
_Proceedings_. The case, at the same time, is far from being one of
the most striking; it should rather be classed, were it not for the
importance of the sitters concerned, among the minor successes of
the Piper series. Hodgson, according to the invariable custom of the
spirits, is, first of all, bent on making himself recognized; and the
inevitable, tedious string of trifling reminiscences begins twenty
times over again and fills page after page. As usual in such instances,
the recollections common to both the questioner and the spirit who is
supposed to be replying are brought out in their most circumstantial,
their most insignificant and also their most private details with
astonishing eagerness, precision and vivacity. And observe that, for all
these details, which he discloses with such extraordinary facility, the
dead man answering seeks by preference, one would say, the most hidden
and forgotten treasures of the living listener’s memory. He spares
him nothing; he harps on everything with childish satisfaction and
apprehensive solicitude, not so much to persuade others as to prove to
himself that he still exists. And the obstinacy of this poor invisible
being, in striving to manifest himself through the hitherto uncrannied
doors that separate us from our eternal destinies, is at once ridiculous
and tragic:

“Do you remember, William, when we were in the country at So-and-so’s,
that game we played with the children; do you remember my saying
such-and-such a thing when I was in that room where there was
such-and-such a chair or table?”

“Why, yes, Hodgson, I do remember now.”

“A good test, that?”

“First-rate, Hodgson!”

And so on, indefinitely. Sometimes, there is a more significant incident
that seems to surpass the mere transmission of subliminal thought. They
are talking, for instance, of a frustrated marriage which was always
surrounded with great mystery, even to Hodgson’s most intimate friends:

“Do you remember a lady-doctor in New York, a member of our society?”

“No, but what about her?”

“Her husband’s name was Blair ... I think.”

“Do you mean Dr. Blair Thaw?”

“Oh, yes. Ask Mrs. Thaw if I did not at a dinner-party mention something
about the lady. I may have done so.”

James writes to Mrs. Thaw, who declares that, as a matter of fact,
fifteen years before, Hodgson had said to her that he had just proposed
to a girl and been refused. Mrs. Thaw and Dr. Newbold were the only
people in the world who knew the particulars.

But to come to the further sittings. Among other points discussed is
the financial position of the American branch of the S.P.R., a position
which, at the death of the secretary, or rather factotum, Hodgson, was
anything but brilliant. And behold the somewhat strange spectacle of
different members of the society debating its affairs with their defunct
secretary. Shall they dissolve? Shall they amalgamate? Shall they send
the materials collected, most of which are Hodgson’s, to England? They
consult the dead man; he replies, gives good advice, seems fully aware
of all the complications, all the difficulties. One day, in Hodgson’s
lifetime, when the society was found to be short of funds, an anonymous
donor had sent the sum necessary to relieve it from embarrassment.
Hodgson alive did not know who the donor was; Hodgson dead picks him out
among those present, addresses him by name and thanks him publicly. On
another occasion, Hodgson, like all the spirits, complains of the extreme
difficulty which he finds in conveying his thought through the alien
organism of the medium:

“I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying
to find his hat,” he says.

But, when, after so much idle chatter, William James at last puts the
essential questions that burn our lips—“Hodgson, what have you to tell us
about the other life?”—the dead man becomes shifty and does nothing but
seek evasions:

“It is not a vague fantasy but a reality,” he replies.

“But,” Mrs. William James insists, “do you live as we do, as men do?”

“What does she say?” asks the spirit, pretending not to understand.

“Do you live as men do?” repeats William James.

“Do you wear clothing and live in houses?” adds his wife.

“Oh yes, houses, but not clothing. No, that is absurd. Just wait a
moment, I am going to get out.”

“You will come back again?”

“Yes.”

“He has got to go out and get his breath,” remarks another spirit, named
Rector, suddenly intervening.

It has not been waste of time, perhaps, to reproduce the general features
of one of these sittings which may be regarded as typical. I will add,
in order to give an idea of the farthest point which it is possible to
attain, the following instance of an experiment made by Sir Oliver Lodge
and related by him. He handed Mrs. Piper, in her “trance,” a gold watch
which had just been sent him by one of his uncles and which belonged
to that uncle’s twin brother, who had died twenty years before. When
the watch was in her possession, Mrs. Piper, or rather Phinuit, one
of her familiar spirits, began to relate a host of details concerning
the childhood of this twin brother, facts dating back for more than
sixty-six years and of course unknown to Sir Oliver Lodge. Soon after,
the surviving uncle, who lived in another town, wrote and confirmed the
accuracy of most of these details, which he had quite forgotten and of
which he was only now reminded by the medium’s revelations; while those
which he could not recollect at all were subsequently declared to be in
accordance with fact by a third uncle, an old sea-captain, who lived in
Cornwall and who had not the least notion why such strange questions were
put to him.

I quote this instance not because it has any exceptional or decisive
value, but simply, I repeat, by way of an example; for, like the case
connected with Mrs. Thaw, mentioned above, it marks pretty accurately the
extreme points to which people have up to now, thanks to spirit agency,
penetrated the mysteries of the unknown. It is well to add that cases
in which the supposed limits of the most far-reaching telepathy are so
manifestly exceeded are fairly uncommon.

7

Now what are we to think of all this? Must we, with Myers, Newbold,
Hyslop, Hodgson and many others, who studied this problem at length,
conclude in favour of the incontestable agency of forces and
intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which
it was deemed that none might cross. Must we acknowledge with them that
there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to
hesitate any longer between the telepathic theory and the spiritualistic
theory? I do not think so. I have no prejudices—what were the use of
having any, in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival
and the intervention of the dead; but it is wise and necessary, before
leaving the terrestrial plane, to exhaust all the suppositions, all the
explanations there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between
two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof
one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region
which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless
spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It
is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world, as long as
it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from
it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the
adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the
prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums
if we deny them to the dead; but the existence of the medium, contrary
to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the
spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it
exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we know—transmission of
thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events
at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in
evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living
persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever
obtained among living people any series of communications or revelations
similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Thompson and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can compare with them
for continuity or lucidity. But, though the quality of the phenomena
will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is
identical. Our logical inference is that the real cause lies not in the
source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the
power of the medium. For the rest, Mr. J. G. Piddington, who devoted an
exceedingly detailed study to Mrs. Thompson, plainly perceived in her,
when she was not “entranced” and when there were no spirits whatever in
question, manifestations inferior, it is true, but absolutely analogous
to those involving the dead.[7] These mediums are pleased, in all good
faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties,
to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names
which were borne by beings who have crossed to the farther side of the
mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither
lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts. Well, in
examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of
them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world
or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish,
phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has
been violated. In the story of Sir Oliver Lodge’s watch, for instance,
which is one of the most characteristic and one which carries us farther
than most, we must attribute to the medium faculties that have ceased to
be human. She must have put herself in touch, whether by perception of
events at a distance, or by transmission of thought from one subconscious
mind to another, or again by subliminal clairvoyance, with the two
surviving brothers of the deceased owner of the watch; and, in the
past subconsciousness of those two brothers, distant from each other,
she had to rediscover a host of circumstances which they themselves had
forgotten and which lay hidden beneath the heaped-up dust and darkness of
six-and-sixty years. It is certain that a phenomenon of this kind passes
the bounds of the imagination and that we should refuse to credit it if,
first of all, the experiment had not been controlled and certified by a
man of the standing of Sir Oliver Lodge, and if, moreover, it did not
form one of a group of equally significant facts which clearly show that
we are not here concerned with an absolutely unique miracle or with an
unhoped-for and unprecedented concourse of coincidences. It is simply
a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance and telepathy
raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the
unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science,
which is not saying that they are explained: that is another question.
When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive,
negative, induction, potential and resistance, we are also applying
conventional words to facts and phenomena of whose inward essence we are
utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending any
better. There is, I insist, between these extraordinary manifestations
and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the
dead, but a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of
extent or degree and in no wise a difference in kind.

8

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that no one,
neither the medium nor the witnesses, should ever have known of the
existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man, in other words,
that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this
has actually occurred up to the present, nor even that it is possible;
in any case, it would be very difficult to control such an experiment.
Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the
quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power
should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain
cases, of which—as the others were of very much the same nature—I will
merely mention one of the most striking.[8] In a course of excellent
sittings with Mrs. Piper the medium, he communicated with various dead
friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The
medium, the spirits and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating
mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact and easy. In this
extremely favourable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the
soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before and whom
he simply calls “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than
most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved
quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute,
vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now A “had been troubled much, for
years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion,
though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come
before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr.
Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all
the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from
my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained
satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately
than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in
common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but
incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is
not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real,
living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the
hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal
consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its
suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it
makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained
only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness;
otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having
penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon
it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of
mind presupposed in the dead man.

9

Of a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these
extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly
everything, bar every road and all but deny to the spirits any power
of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have
chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict
themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which
memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but
indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there then no other
outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry around us, stagnant in
their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to
be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time?
Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they
survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of
the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is
that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour
is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us;
and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that
is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it
to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while
to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal
fields, in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and
that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric
complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august
and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult
for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a
strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details
about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not
about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about
the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our
body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things,
large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble
eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a
shadow separates us and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past that
they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to
seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would
nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which
nothing now enthrals some other discourse than that which it avoided when
it was still subject to matter.

IV

OUR ULTIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS

1

Survival with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and
incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were
admissible, it could not be dreadful. This is certain that, when the body
disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time;
for we cannot imagine a spirit 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 spirit 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, betrayal, personal
humiliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it
loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which
it animates. Outside its own pain, which is the pain of not knowing,
the spirit, once delivered from its flesh, could suffer only in the
recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the
troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes,
since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief
that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and
knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.

The spirit 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 there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend
them.

2

It becomes a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all
sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the
bosom of infinity and up to what point it is important that it should
recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without
consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of
to-day.

Survival without consciousness seems at first sight the more 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 limit their anxiety to that. They have
nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any remained,
should 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 fosters indolence. If we press those who
speak of 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
cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to
solve 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.

3

It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every
side, we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite
consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words
consciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the
most definite thing conceivable in the finite; consciousness, properly
speaking, is the finite self-concentrated in order to discover and feel
its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as
possible. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to separate the idea
of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence that
does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness becomes
for us a mysterious phenomenon to which we give names more mysterious
still, lest we should have to admit that we understand nothing of it at
all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a dot in space, we
see expended in every scale of life, as for instance, in the wonderful
combinations and organisms of the insect world, a mass of intelligence
so vast that our human intelligence cannot even dream of assessing it.
Everything that exists—and man first of all—is incessantly drawing upon
that inexhaustible reserve. We are therefore irresistibly driven to
ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not the emanation of an
infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or later, elaborate
one. And this sets us tossing between two irreducible impossibilities.
What is most probable is that here again we are judging everything from
the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the summit of our infinitesimal
life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the extreme point of
thought; and from this we infer that, at the summits of all lives, there
could be naught but intelligence and consciousness, whereas these perhaps
occupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of spiritual or other
possibilities.

4

Survival absolutely denuded of consciousness would, therefore, be
possible only if we deny the existence of a cosmic consciousness.
When once we admit this consciousness, under whatsoever form, we are
bound to share in it; and, up to a certain point, the question is
indistinguishable from that of the continuance of a more or less 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 splendid 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.

Suppose that a child in its mother’s womb were endowed with a certain
consciousness; that unborn twins, for instance, could, in some obscure
fashion, exchange their impressions and communicate their hopes and
fears to each other. Having known naught but the warm maternal shades,
they would not feel straitened nor unhappy there. They would probably
have no other idea than to prolong as long as possible that life of
abundance free from cares and of sleep free from alarms. But, if, even
as we are aware that we must die, they too knew that they must be born,
that is to say, that they must suddenly leave the shelter of that gentle
darkness and abandon for ever that captive but peaceful existence, to be
precipitated into an absolutely different, unimaginable and boundless
world, how great would be their anxieties and their fears! And yet there
is no reason why our own anxieties and fears should be more justified
or less ridiculous. The character, the spirit, the intentions, the
benevolence or the indifference of the unknown to which we are subject do
not alter between our birth and our death. We remain always in the same
infinity, in the same universe. It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate
to persuade ourselves that the tomb is no more dreadful than the cradle.
It would even be legitimate and reasonable to accept the cradle only on
account of the tomb. 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 glorious hour of death, which of us, knowing what he
ought to know, would accept the disquieting problem of an existence
that would not lead to the reassuring mystery of its end? Which of us
would wish to come into a world where we can learn so little, if he did
not know that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more?
The best thing about 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 number among
the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost unimaginable
that a thought should not 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.

5

Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to maintain
their ego that they are calling for the sufferings which they dread.
The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in so far as it
is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger the ego, the
narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The more painful too;
for the mind, if it remain as we know it—and we are not able to imagine
it different—will no sooner have seen its limits than it will wish to
overstep them; and, the more separated it feels, the greater will be its
longing to unite with that which lies outside. There will therefore be
an eternal struggle between its being and its aspirations. And really it
would have served no object to be born and die only to arrive at these
interminable contests. Have we not here yet one more proof that our ego,
as we conceive it, could never subsist in the infinity where it must
needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It behoves us therefore to clear
away conceptions that emanate only from our body, even as the mists that
veil the daylight from our sight emanate only from the lowlands. Pascal
has said, once and for all:

“The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view.”

6

On the other hand—for we must keep nothing back, nor turn from the
adverse darkness should it seem nearest to the truth, nor show any
bias—on the other hand, we can grant to those who yearn to remain as they
are that the survival of an atom of themselves would suffice for a new
entrance into an infinity from which their body no longer separates them.

If it seems impossible that anything—a movement, a vibration, a
radiation—should stop or disappear, why then should thought be lost?
There will, no doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to
allure the new ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that
it will find in that boundless environment, just as the other ego, on
this earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since
we have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it
be impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear
to us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day;
it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much more
chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more alien substance
than any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a long series
of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not become aware
until the awakening of our memory; and its kernel, of which we do not
know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less concrete than a
thought. If the new environment which we enter on leaving our mother’s
womb transforms us to such a point that there is, so to speak, no
connection between the embryo that we were and the man that we have
become, is it not right to think that the far newer, stranger, wider and
richer environment which we enter on quitting life will transform us even
more? We can see in what happens to us here a figure of what awaits us
elsewhere and can readily admit that our spiritual being, liberated from
its body, if it does not mingle at the first onset with the infinite,
will develop itself there gradually, will choose itself a substance and,
no longer trammelled by space and time, will go on for ever growing.
It is very possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become
the law of our future development. It is very possible that our best
thoughts will welcome us on the farther shore and that the quality of our
intellect will determine that of the infinite which crystallizes around
it. Every hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be
addressed to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us.
It finds no place in the human imagination that methodically explores
the future. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of our
destiny.

7

We have said that the peculiar sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of
not knowing or not understanding, which includes the sorrow of being
powerless; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer paralysed
by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he who
understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a mistake,
which is not possible, an infinite mistake being inconceivable. I do not
believe that another sorrow of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only
one sorrow which, at first thought, might seem admissible—and which, in
any case, could be but ephemeral—would arise from the sight of the pain
and misery remaining on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow,
after all, would be but one aspect and an insignificant phase of the
sorrow of being powerless and of not understanding. As for the latter,
though it is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at
an insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it would
be intolerable only if it were without hope. But, for that, the universe
would have to abandon any attempt to understand itself, or else admit
within itself an object that remained for ever foreign to it. Either the
mind will not perceive its limits and, consequently, will not suffer from
them, or else it will overstep them as it perceives them; for how could
the universe have parts eternally condemned to form no part of itself
and of its knowledge? Hence we cannot understand that the torture of not
understanding, supposing it to exist for a moment, should not end by
absorption in the state of infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we
comprehend it, could be naught but an indifference higher and purer than
joy.

V

THE TWO ASPECTS OF INFINITY

1

Let us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem goes beyond humanity and
embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view infinity under two
distinct aspects. Let us contemplate the first of them. We are plunged in
a universe that has no limits in space or time. It can neither go forward
nor go back. It has no origin. It never began, nor will it ever end. The
myriads of years behind it are even as the myriads which it has yet to
unroll. From all time it has been at the boundless centre of the days.
It could have no aim, for, if it had one, it would have attained it in
the infinity of the years that lie behind us; besides, that aim would
lie outside itself and, if anything lay outside it, infinity would be
bounded by that thing and would cease to be infinity. It is not making
for anywhere, for it would have arrived there; consequently, all that the
worlds within its pale, all that we ourselves do can have no influence
upon it. All that it will do it has done. All that it has not done
remains undone because it can never do it. If it have no mind, it will
never have one. If it have one, that mind has been at its climax from all
time and will remain there, changeless and immovable. It is as young as
it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It has made in the past
all the efforts and all the trials which it will make in the future; and,
as all the possible combinations have been exhausted since what we cannot
even call the beginning, it does not seem as if that which has not taken
place in the eternity that stretches before our birth can happen in the
eternity that will follow our death. If it have not become conscious,
it will never become conscious; if it know not what it wishes, it will
continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or knowing nothing and
remaining as near its end as its beginning.

This is the gloomiest thought to which man can attain. So far, I do not
think that its depths have been sufficiently sounded. If it were really
irrefutable—and some may contend that it is—if it actually contained the
last word of the great riddle, it would be almost impossible to live in
its shadow. Naught save the certainty that our conceptions of time and
space are illusive and absurd can lighten the abyss wherein our last hope
would perish.

2

The universe thus conceived would be, if not intelligible, at least
admissible by our reason; but in that universe float billions of
worlds limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are
born again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that
parts of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and
end. We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so
infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going
nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That
which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems to be
eternally experimenting with more or less ill-success. At what goal is
it aiming, since it is already there? Everything that we discover in
that which could not possibly have an object looks as though it were
pursuing one with inconceivable ardour; and the mind that animates what
we see, in that which should know everything and possess itself, seems
to know nothing and to seek itself without intermission. Thus all that
is apparent to our senses in infinity gainsays that which our reason
is compelled to ascribe to it. According as we fathom it, we come to
understand how deep is our want of understanding; and, the more we strive
to penetrate the two incomprehensible problems that stand face to face,
the more they contradict each other.

3

What will become of us amid all this confusion? Shall we leave the finite
wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other infinite? In
other words, shall we end by absorption in the infinite which our reason
conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which our eyes behold,
that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral worlds? Shall we
never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and to be reborn
eternally, to enter at last into that which, from all eternity, can
neither have been born nor have died and which exists without either
future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that surrounds us, from
this unhappy speculation, to find our way at last into peace, wisdom,
changeless and boundless consciousness, or into hopeless unconsciousness?
Shall we have the fate which our senses foretell, or that which our
intelligence demands? Or are both senses and intelligence only illusions,
puny implements, vain weapons of an hour, which were never intended to
examine or defy the universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it
wise to accept it and to deem impossible that which we do not understand,
seeing that we understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable
distance from these inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and
irreducible and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain
that falls upon the sea?

4

But, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between
the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses
is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe
that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
combination has been made; when we declare that there is no chance
that what has not taken place in the immeasurable past can take place
in the immeasurable future, our imagination perhaps attributes to the
infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth,
all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its
disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie therein
have not been exhausted in the eternity that has gone before us any
more than they could be in the eternity that will come after us. The
infinity of time is no vaster than the infinity of the substance of the
universe. Events, forces, chances, causes, effects, phenomena, fusions,
combinations, coincidences, harmonies, unions, possibilities, lives are
represented in it by countless numbers that entirely fill a bottomless
and vergeless abyss where they have been shaken together from what we
call the beginning of the world that had no beginning and where they
will be stirred up until the end of a world that will have no end.
There is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It
is probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day,
that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what it
wants. It is possible that its ideal is still veiled by the shadow of its
immensity; it is also possible that experiments and chances are following
one upon the other in unimaginable worlds, compared wherewith all those
which we see on starry nights are no more than a pinch of gold-dust in
the ocean depths. Lastly, if either be true, it is also true that we
ourselves, or what remains of us—it matters not—will profit one day by
those experiments and those chances. That which has not yet happened may
suddenly supervene; and the next state, with the supreme wisdom which
will recognize and be able to establish that state, is perhaps ready to
arise from the clash of circumstances. It would not be at all astonishing
if the consciousness of the universe, in the endeavour to form itself,
had not yet encountered the combination of necessary chances and if human
thought were actually supporting one of those decisive chances. Here
there is a hope. Small as man and his brain may appear, they have exactly
the value of the most enormous forces that they are able to conceive,
since there is neither great nor small in the immensurable; and, if our
body equalled the dimensions of all the worlds which our eyes can see, it
would have exactly the same weight and the same importance, as compared
with the universe, that it has to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in
infinity a space which comparisons do not reduce to nothing.

5

For the rest, if everything must be said, at the cost of constantly
and shamelessly contradicting one’s self in the dark, and to return to
the first supposition, the idea of possible progress, it is extremely
probable that this again is one of those childish disorders of our brain
which prevent us from seeing the thing that is. It is quite as probable,
as we have seen above, that there never was, that there never will be any
progress, because there could not be a goal. At most there may occur a
few ephemeral combinations which, to our poor eyes, will seem happier or
more beautiful than the others. Even so we think gold more beautiful than
the mud in the street, or the flower in a splendid garden happier than
the stone at the bottom of a drain; but all this, obviously, is of no
importance, has no corresponding reality and proves nothing in particular.

The more we reflect upon it, the more pronounced is the infirmity of our
intelligence which cannot succeed in reconciling the idea of progress and
even the idea of experiment with the supreme idea of infinity. Although
nature has been incessantly and indefatigably repeating herself before
our eyes for thousands of years, reproducing the same trees and the same
animals, we cannot contrive to understand why the universe indefinitely
recommences experiments that have been made billions of times. It is
inevitable that, in the innumerable combinations that have been and are
being made in termless time and boundless space, there have been and
still are millions of planets and consequently millions of human races
exactly similar to our own, side by side with myriads of others more
or less different from it. Let us not say to ourselves that it would
require an unimaginable concourse of circumstances to reproduce a globe
like unto our earth in every respect. We must remember that we are in
the infinite and that this unimaginable concourse must necessarily take
place in the innumerousness which we are unable to imagine. Though
it need billions and billions of cases for two features to coincide,
those billions and billions will encumber infinity no more than would a
single case. Place an infinite number of worlds in an infinite number
of infinitely diverse circumstances: there will always be an infinite
number for which those circumstances will be alike; if not, we should be
setting bounds to our idea of the universe, which would forthwith become
more incomprehensible still. From the moment that we insist sufficiently
upon that thought, we necessarily arrive at these conclusions. If they
have not struck us hitherto, it is because we never go to the farthest
point of our imagination. Now the farthest point of our imagination is
but the beginning of reality and gives us only a small, purely human
universe, which, vast as it may seem, dances in the real universe like an
apple on the sea. I repeat, if we do not admit that thousands of worlds,
similar in all points to our own, in spite of the billions of adverse
chances, have always existed and still exist to-day, we are sapping
the foundations of the only possible conception of the universe or of
infinity.

6

Now how is it that those millions of exactly similar human races, which
from all time suffer what we have suffered and are still suffering,
profit us nothing, that all their experiences and all their schools have
had no influence upon our first efforts and that everything has to be
done again and begun again incessantly?

As we see, the two theories balance each other. It is well to acquire
by degrees the habit of understanding nothing. There remains to us the
faculty of choosing the less gloomy of the two or persuading ourselves
that the mists of the other exist only in our brain. As that strange
visionary, William Blake, said:

    “Nor is it possible to thought
    A greater than itself to know.”

Let us add that it is not possible for it to know anything other than
itself. What we do not know would be enough to create the world afresh;
and what we do know cannot add one moment to the life of a fly. Who can
tell but that our chief mistake lies in believing that an intelligence,
were it an intelligence thousands of times as great as ours, directs the
universe? It may be a force of quite another nature, a force that differs
as widely from that on which our brain prides itself as electricity, for
instance, differs from the wind that blows. That is why it is fairly
probable that our mind, however powerful it become, will always grope in
mystery. If it be certain that everything in us must also be in nature,
because everything comes to us from her, if the mind and all the logic
which it has placed at the culminating point of our being direct or
seem to direct all the actions of our life, it by no means follows that
there is not in the universe a force greatly superior to thought, a
force having no imaginable relation to the mind, a force which animates
and governs all things according to other laws and of which nothing is
found in us but almost imperceptible traces, even as almost imperceptible
traces of thought are all that can be found in plants and minerals.

In any case, there is nothing here to make us lose courage. It is
necessarily the human illusion of evil, ugliness, uselessness and
impossibility that is to blame. We must wait not for the universe to be
transformed, but for our intelligence to expand or to take part in the
other force; and we must maintain our confidence in a world which knows
nothing of our conceptions of purpose and progress, because it doubtless
has ideas whereof we have no idea, a world, moreover, which could
scarcely wish itself harm.

7

“These are but vain speculations,” it will be said. “What matters,
after all, the idea which we form of those things which belong to the
unknowable, seeing that the unknowable, were we a thousand times as
intelligent as we are, is closed to us for ever and that the idea which
we form of it will never have any value?”

That is true; but there are degrees in our ignorance of the unknowable;
and each of these degrees marks a triumph of the intelligence. To
estimate more and more completely the extent of what it does not know is
all that man’s knowledge can hope for. Our idea of the unknowable was and
always will be valueless, I admit; but it nevertheless is and will remain
the most important idea of mankind. All our morality, all that is in the
highest degree noble and profound in our existence has always been based
on this idea devoid of real value. To-day, as yesterday, even though
it be possible to recognize more clearly that it is too incomplete and
relative ever to have any actual value, it is necessary to carry it as
high and as far as we can. It alone creates the only atmosphere wherein
the best part of ourselves can live. Yes, it is the unknowable into which
we shall not enter; but that is no reason for saying to ourselves:

“I am closing all the doors and all the windows; henceforth, I shall
interest myself only in things which my everyday intelligence can
compass. Those things alone have the right to influence my actions and my
thoughts.”

Where should we arrive at that rate? What things can my intelligence
compass? Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from the
inconceivable? Since there is no means of eliminating that inconceivable,
it is reasonable and salutary to make the best of it and therefore to
imagine it as stupendously vast as we are able. The gravest reproach
that can be brought against the positive religions and notably against
Christianity is that they have too often, if not in theory, at least in
practice, encouraged such a narrowing of the mystery of the universe. By
broadening it, we broaden the space wherein our mind will move. It is for
us what we make it: let us then form it of all that we can reach on the
horizon of ourselves. As for the mystery itself, we shall, of-course,
never reach it; but we have a much greater chance of approaching it by
facing it and going whither it draws us than by turning our backs upon it
and returning to that place where we well know that it no longer is. Not
by diminishing our thoughts shall we diminish the distance that separates
us from the ultimate truths; but by enlarging them as much as possible we
are sure of deceiving ourselves as little as possible. And the loftier
our idea of the infinite, the more buoyant and the purer becomes the
spiritual atmosphere wherein we live and the wider and deeper the horizon
against which our thoughts and feelings stand out, the horizon which is
all their life and which they inspire.

“Perpetually to construct ideas requiring the utmost stretch of our
faculties,” wrote Herbert Spencer, “and perpetually to find that such
ideas must be abandoned as futile imaginations, may realize to us more
fully than any other course the greatness of that which we vainly strive
to grasp.... By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown
back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may
keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and
our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the
Unknowable.”

8

Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
absolute and perfect infinity—the changeless, immovable infinity which
has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our reason
tends—or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence, undeniable
here below, of our senses—the infinity which seeks itself, which is still
evolving and not yet established—it behoves us above all to foresee in it
our fate, which, for that matter, must, in either case, end by absorption
in that very infinity.

VI

OUR FATE IN THOSE INFINITIES

1

The first infinity, the ideal infinity, corresponds most nearly with
the requirements of our reason, which does not justify us in giving
it the preference. It is impossible for us to foresee what we shall
become in it, because it seems to exclude any becoming. It therefore but
remains for us to address ourselves to the second, to that which we see
and imagine in time and space. Furthermore, it is possible that it may
precede the other. However absolute our conception of the universe, we
have seen that we can always admit that what has not taken place in the
eternity before us will happen in the eternity after us and that there
is nothing save an untold number of chances to prevent the universe from
acquiring in the end that perfect consciousness which will establish it
at its zenith.

2

Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar infinity,
the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other things from our
eyes, but which cannot be a total illusion. It seems to us to be peopled
only with objects—planets, suns, stars, nebulæ, atoms, imponderous
fluids—which move, unite and separate, repel and attract one another,
which shrink and expand, are for ever shifting and never arrive, which
measure space in that which has no confines and number the hours in that
which has no term. In a word, we are in an infinity that seems to have
almost the same character and the same habits as that power in the midst
of which we breathe and which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.

What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle
question, even if we should unite with it after losing all consciousness,
all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as no more than a
little nameless substance—soul or matter, we cannot tell—suspended in the
equally nameless abyss that replaces time and space. It is not an idle
question, for it concerns the history of the worlds or of the universe;
and this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
incomparably better and vaster will end by meeting us again some day.

3

Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider the
ways of nature and remember that we form part of a universe that has
not yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and
bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we
have lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly
sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind,
lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to
world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly,
will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have
already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagination can touch
with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and our
mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at least,
the obviously single force to which we give that double name) which
composed them and whose fate must be no more indifferent to us than our
own fate; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of
the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to
ourselves:

“What can it matter? We shall not be there.”

We shall be there always, because everything will be there.

4

And will this everything wherein we shall be included, in a world ever
seeking itself, continue a prey to new and perpetual and perhaps painful
experiences? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the part
that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that yonder
the unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
more stupid and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
others which ought to have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity?
It is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our
sorrows are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that
they make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
complete consciousness, a more just and serene understanding than on
this earth and in the worlds which we discern? And, if it be true that
it has somewhere attained that better understanding, why does the mind
that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by it? Is no
communication possible between worlds which must have been born of the
same idea and which lie in its depths? What would be the mystery of that
isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the farthest stage and
the most successful experiment? What, then, can the mind of the universe
have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come
only to this? But, on the other hand, that darkness and those barriers
which can have come only from itself, since they could have arisen no
elsewhere, have they the power to stay its progress? Who then could have
set those insoluble problems to infinity and from what more remote and
profound region than itself could they have issued? Some one, after all,
must know the answer; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is
not infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a
will that leaves no point around it which is not wholly covered. Or are
the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue of
the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and their pitiful
consequences, according to the custom of nature, who knows nothing of
our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as she does the seed on
earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again, is the whole question
of our peace and happiness, like that of the fate of the worlds, reduced
to knowing whether or not the infinity of endeavours and combinations be
equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly, to come to what is most likely, is
it we who deceive ourselves, who know nothing, who see nothing and who
consider imperfect that which is perhaps faultless, we who are but an
infinitesimal fragment of the intelligence which we judge by the aid of
the little shreds of understanding which it has vouchsafed to lend us?

5

How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
infinite and the invisible, we who do not understand nor even see the
thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds which
he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not perceive
the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment when they are
stopped by an object akin to those with which his eye is familiar upon
this earth: were it otherwise, the whole space filled with innumerable
suns and boundless forces, instead of being an abyss of absolute
darkness, absorbing and extinguishing shafts of light that shoot across
it from every side, would be but a monstrous and unbearable ocean of
flashes.

And, if we do not see the light, at least we think we know a few of its
rays or its reflections; but we are absolutely ignorant of that which is
unquestionably the essential law of the universe, namely, gravitation.
What is that force, the most powerful of all and the least visible,
imperceptible to our senses, without form, without colour, without
temperature, without substance, without savour and without voice, but
so awful that it suspends and moves in space all the worlds which we
see and all those which we shall never know? More rapid, more subtle,
more incorporeal than thought, it wields such sway over everything that
exists, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, that there is
not a grain of sand upon our earth nor a drop of blood in our veins but
are penetrated, wrought upon and quickened by it until they act at every
moment upon the farthest planet of the last solar system that we struggle
to imagine beyond the bounds of our imagination.

Shakspeare’s famous lines,

    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,”

have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more
things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is none but
things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the unimaginable;
and, if we do not even see the light, which is the one thing that we
believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing all around us but
the invisible.

We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing
or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just
as they would prevent us from understanding it if an intelligence of
a different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining
it to us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as
the universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those
which to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such
as the origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up
behind them, like eternal mountains, others quite as great and quite
as unfathomable; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it
would have to know in order to hold the key to the riddle of this world,
it would always find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It
would be just the same if we possessed an intelligence several million
times greater and more penetrating than ours. All that its miraculously
increased power could discover would encounter limits no less impassable
than at present. All is boundless in that which has no bounds. We shall
be the eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for
us to appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards that
which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is
to struggle towards that which appears to us the best, and to remain
heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines can
ever be wholly lost.

6

But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From the
point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way necessary
that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the universe have
already found its consciousness, whether it find it one day or seek it
everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of being unhappy and
of suffering, either in its entirety, or in any one of its parts; and it
matters little if the latter be invisible or incommensurable, considering
that the smallest is as great as the greatest in what has neither limit
nor measure. To torture a point is the same thing as to torture the
worlds; and, if it torture the worlds, it is its own substance that it
tortures. Its very fate, wherein we have our part, protects us; for we
are simply morsels of infinity. It is inseparable from us as we are
inseparable from it. Its breath is our breath, its aim is our aim and we
bear within us all its mysteries. We participate in it everywhere. There
is naught in us that escapes it; there is naught in it but belongs to
us. It extends us, fills us, traverses us on every side. In space and
time and in that which, beyond space and time, has as yet no name, we
represent it and summarize it completely, with all its properties and all
its future; and, if its immensity terrifies us, we are as terrifying as
itself.

If, therefore, we had to suffer in it, our sufferings could be but
ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and its
sole master: if not, the law or the master whom it must obey would be
the universe alone; and the centre of a word which we pronounce without
being able to grasp its scope would be simply shifted. If it be unhappy,
that means that it wills its own unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness,
it is mad; and, if it appear to us mad, that means that our reason works
contrary to everything and to the only laws possible, seeing that they
are eternal, or, to speak more humbly, that it judges what it wholly
fails to understand.

7

Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps already be, if not in a state
of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all anxiety,
all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all, is our happiness upon this
earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow, anxiety and unhappiness?

But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is
in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is
something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our
stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere.
It proceeds entirely from a few contingencies of our nerves, which are
made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have
felt everything the opposite way and taken pleasure in that which is now
pain.

I do not know if my readers remember the striking passage in which Sir
William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential
laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic man, while
forces of which we are almost wholly ignorant, such as surface-tension,
capillarity or the Brownian movements, would preponderate. Walking on
a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had fallen, and seeing it
studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer that water was a solid
body which assumes spherical form and rises in the air. At no great
distance, he might come to a pond, when he would observe that this
same matter, instead of rising upwards, now seems to slope downwards
in a vast curve from the brink. If he managed, with the aid of his
friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel bars which
we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of concave trough
on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and a
thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce theories
diametrically opposed to those upon which our entire existence is based.
It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction of time,
to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher William James:

“Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly
ten thousand events instead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then
destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand
times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know
nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era.
The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be
inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be
almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and
suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that we
get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as long.
Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms
and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to
appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the
earth like restlessly boiling water-springs; the motions of animals will
be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls;
the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail
behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman
longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be
rash to deny.”

8

We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths,
torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great
interplanetary spaces, with their intense cold and their awful and gloomy
solitudes; and we imagine that the worlds that revolve through space are
as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or disaggregate, or clash
together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this
that the genius of the universe is an abominable tyrant, seized with a
monstrous madness, delighting only in the torture of itself and all that
it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than
our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our
language is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility,
the little ephemeral play of our nerves; and we are convinced that life
there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot
or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need
but a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin, the slightest
modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature of space, its
silence and its darkness into a delicious springtime, an incomparable
music, a divine light.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” said Faraday.

It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes
which our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or
other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death,
thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit
us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt
or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of
a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an
unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What
though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but
birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful
promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event.

VII

CONCLUSIONS

1

In order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory,
let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have
put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and
total annihilation. Annihilation is physically impossible; the religious
solutions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human
reason does not penetrate. Next comes the theory of the survival of
our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired
consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this theory, strictly
defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be desired,
although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our ills,
it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other
hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear
less barbarous or less crude, we come back to the theory of a cosmic
consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that
of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every
supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination.

Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to
annihilation pure and simple, and consequently would be no more dreadful
than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with
no awakening. The theory is unquestionably more acceptable than that of
annihilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic
consciousness and of a modified consciousness.

2

Before replying to these, we must choose our universe, for we have the
choice. It is a matter of knowing how we propose to look at infinity. Is
it the moveless, immovable infinity, from all eternity perfect and at
its zenith, and the purposeless universe that our reason will conceive
at the farthest point of our thoughts? Do we believe that, at our death,
the illusion of movement and progress which we see from the depths of
this life will suddenly fade away? If so, it is inevitable that, at our
last breath, we shall be absorbed in what, for lack of a better term, we
call the cosmic consciousness. Are we, on the other hand, persuaded that
death will reveal to us that the illusion lies not in our senses but in
our reason and that, in a world incontestably alive, despite the eternity
preceding our birth, all the experiments have not been made, that is
to say that movement and evolution continue and will never and nowhere
stop? In that case, we must at once accept the theory of a modified
or progressive consciousness. The two aspects, after all, are equally
unintelligible but defensible; and, although really irreconcilable, they
agree on one point, namely, that unending pain and unredeemed misery are
alike excluded from them both for ever.

3

The theory of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss
of the tiny consciousness acquired in our body; but it makes it almost
negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course
impossible to support this theory with satisfactory proofs; but it is
not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak
of likeness to truth in this connexion, when our only truth is that we
do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim theories
and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, varied and
alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or whatever we call
that which will survive us in order to continue us as we are, will it
find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives which it must
have lived since the thousands of years that had no beginning? Will
it continue to increase by assimilating all that it meets in infinity
during the thousands of years that will have no end? Will it linger for
a time around our earth, leading, in regions invisible to our eyes, an
ever higher and happier existence, as the theosophists and spiritualists
contend? Will it move towards other planetary systems, will it emigrate
to other worlds, whose existence is not even suspected by our senses?
Everything seems permissible in this great dream, save that which might
arrest its flight.

Nevertheless, so soon as it ventures too far in the ultramondane spaces,
it crashes into strange obstacles and breaks its wings against them. If
we admit that our ego does not remain eternally what it was at the moment
of our death, we can no longer imagine that, at a given second, it stops,
ceases to expand and rise, attains its perfection and its fulness, to
become no more than a sort of motionless wreck suspended in eternity and
a finished thing in the midst of that which will never finish. That would
indeed be the only real death and the more fearful inasmuch as it would
set a limit to an unparalleled life and intelligence, beside which those
which we possess here below would not even weigh what a drop of water
weighs when compared with the ocean, or a grain of sand when placed in
the scales with a mountain-chain. In a word, either we believe that our
evolution will one day stop, implying thereby an incomprehensible end
and a sort of inconceivable death; or we admit that it has no limit,
whereupon, being infinite, it assumes all the properties of infinity
and must needs be lost in infinity and united with it. This, withal,
is the latter end of theosophy, spiritualism and all the religions in
which man, in his ultimate happiness, is absorbed by God. And this again
is an incomprehensible end, but at least it is life. And then, taking
one incomprehensibility with another, after doing all that is humanly
possible to understand one or the other riddle, let us by preference
leap into the greatest and therefore the most probable, the one which
contains all the others and after which nothing more remains. If not, the
questions reappear at every stage and the answers are always conflicting.
And questions and answers lead us to the same inevitable abyss. As we
shall have to face it sooner or later, why not make for it straightway?
All that happens to us in the interval interests us beyond a doubt, but
does not detain us, because it is not eternal.

4

Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness. Although
we are incapable of understanding the act of an infinity that would have