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Whatever we may think of the plausibility of the doctrine or revelation, we cannot dispute that this morality and this justification of justice are the most ancient and at the same time the most beautiful and reassuring that the mind of man has imagined. But they are based upon a postulate which we are perhaps too much inclined to refuse blindly. It asks us in fact to admit that our existence does not end at the hour of our death and that the spirit, or the vital spark, which does not perish, seeks an asylum and reappears in other bodies. At first the postulate seems monstrous and unacceptable; but on closer examination its aspect becomes much less strange, less arbitrary and less unreasonable. It is, to begin with, certain that, if all things undergo transformation, nothing perishes or is annihilated in a universe which knows no nothingness and in which nothingness alone remains absolutely inconceivable. What we call nothingness could therefore be only another mode of existence, of persistence and of life; and, if we cannot admit that the body, which is only matter, is annihilated in its substance, it is no less difficult to admit that, if it were animated by a spirit—which it is hardly possible to dispute—this spirit should disappear without leaving a trace of any kind.
So the first point of the postulate and the most important is of necessity granted. There remains the second point, that of the successive reincarnations. Here, it is true, we have only hypotheses and probabilities. It is necessary that this spirit, this soul, this vital spark or principle, this idea, this immaterial substance—it matters little what name we give it—must go or reside somewhere, must do or become something. It may wander in the infinity of space and time, dissolve, lose itself and disappear, or at least mingle and become confused with what it encounters there, and finally become absorbed in that boundless spiritual or vital energy which appears to animate the universe. But, of all hypotheses, the least probable is not that which tells us that, on leaving a body which has become uninhabitable, instead of escaping and wandering through the illimitable vast that fills it with terror, it looks about it for a lodging resembling that which it has lately quitted. Obviously this is only an hypothesis; but in our complete and terrible ignorance it presents itself before any other. We have nothing to support it save the most ancient tradition of humanity, a tradition perhaps prehuman and in any case absolutely general; and experience tends to show that at the base of these traditions and these instances of universal assent there is nearly always a great truth and that they must be accorded a greater importance and a greater value than have hitherto been attributed to them.