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Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached this question in an essay on Immortality,[[2]] of which I will only reproduce a few essential passages, restricting myself to supporting them with new considerations.
What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into the centre of the universe, the only point that matters in space and time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is almost certain that an intelligence devoid of senses, devoid of organs to create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which has derived all that inspires it from our sensibility.
This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of its destruction, this ego, therefore, is neither our mind nor our body, since we recognize that both are waves that roll by and are incessantly renewed. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or substance, for these are always in evolution, nor yet life, which is the cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for us either to apprehend or define it, or even to say where it dwells. When we try to go back to its last source, we find little more than a succession of memories, a mass of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled, all connected with the same instinct, the instinct of living: a mass of habits of our sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. As an English poet has very truly said, “that which cries aloud for eternity is the very part of me that will perish.”