4
Let us observe, however, that the problem of immortality or annihilation ought not to be set in these terms, since the word annihilation cannot be employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to denote a life which we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or nothingness is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and whose non-existence is absolutely certain.
As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present consciousness.
But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense, the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case, it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question. It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes, yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no longer quite know what it is capable of doing.
HOPE AND DESPAIR