8
Lastly, how shall we explain that, in that consciousness which ought to survive us, the infinity that precedes our birth has left no trace? Had we no consciousness in that infinity, or did we perchance lose it on coming into the world and did the catastrophe that produces the whole terror of death take place at the moment of our birth? None can deny that this infinity has the same rights over us as that which follows our decease. We are as much the children of the first as of the second; and we must of necessity have a part in both. If you maintain that you will always exist, you are bound to admit that you have always existed; we cannot imagine the one without having to imagine the other. If nothing ends, nothing begins, for any such beginning would be the end of something. Now, although I have existed since all time, I have no consciousness whatever of my previous existence, whereas I shall have to carry to the boundless horizon of the endless ages the tiny consciousness acquired during the instant that elapses between my birth and my death. Can my true ego, then, which is about to become eternal, date only from my short sojourn on this earth? And all the preceding eternity, which is of exactly the same value as that which follows, since it is the same, shall it not count? Will it be flung into nihility? Why is a strange privilege accorded to a few meaningless days spent on an unimportant planet? Is it because in that previous eternity we had no consciousness? What do we know about it? It seems very unlikely. Why should the acquisition of consciousness be a phenomenon unrepeated in an eternity that had at its disposal innumerable billions of chances, among which—unless we set a limit to the infinity of the ages—it is impossible to conceive that the thousands of coincidences which went to form my present consciousness did not occur over and over again? The moment we turn our gaze upon the mysteries of that eternity wherein all that happens must already have happened, it seems much more credible, on the contrary, that we have had consciousness upon consciousness which our life of to-day hides from our view. If they have existed and if, at our death, one consciousness must survive, the others must survive as well, for there is no reason to bestow so disproportionate a favour upon that consciousness which we have acquired here below. And, if all of them survive and awaken at the same time, what will become of the petty consciousness of a few terrestrial moments, when it is submerged in those eternal existences? Besides, even if it were to forget all its previous existences, what would become of it amid the perpetual buffeting, the endless wash of its posthumous eternity? For it is but as a poor sand-drift of an island in the unrelenting jaws of two boundless oceans. It would hold its own there, puny and so precarious, only on condition that it acquired nothing more, that it remained for ever closed, isolated and confined, impenetrable and insensible to all things, in the midst of the astounding mysteries, the fabulous treasures and visions which it would have eternally to pass through without ever seeing or hearing anything; and that surely would be the worst death and the worst destiny that could befall us. We are, therefore, driven on all sides towards the theories of an universal consciousness or of a modified consciousness, both of which we shall examine presently.