6
One foremost truth, pending others which the future will no doubt reveal, is that, in these questions of life and death, our imagination has remained very childish. Almost every elsewhere, it is ahead of reason; but here it still loiters over the games of infancy. It surrounds itself with the barbaric dreams and longings wherewith it cradled the hopes and fears of cave-dwelling man. It asks for things that are impossible because they are too small. It clamours for privileges which, if obtained, were more to be dreaded than the most enormous disasters with which nihility threatens us. Can we think without shuddering of an eternity contained wholly within our paltry present-day consciousness? And behold how, in all this, we obey the illogical whims of fancy, which men in the olden time called la folle du logis. Which of us, if he were to go to sleep to-night in the scientific certainty of awaking in a hundred years exactly as he is to-day, with his body intact, even on condition that he lost all memory of his previous life—would such memories not be useless?—which of us would not welcome that age-long sleep with the same confidence as the brief, gentle slumbers of his every night? And yet between real death and this sleep there would be only the difference of that awakening deferred for a century, an awakening as alien to the sleeper as the birth of a posthumous child would be.
Or else, to say very much what Schopenhauer said to one who was unwilling to admit an immortality into which he would not carry his consciousness:
“Suppose that, to snatch you from some intolerable suffering, you were promised an awakening and a return to consciousness after a wholly unconscious sleep of three months?”
“‘I would accept it gladly.’
“But suppose that, at the end of the three months, they forgot you and did not wake you until ten thousand years had passed, how much the wiser would you be? And, sleep once begun, what difference does it make to you whether it last for three months or for ever?”