That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of discretion which the reader will appreciate.
But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear), and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind, is to my mind a foregone conclusion.
It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's imagination—merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in a dream—even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief, irresponsible existence at once!
* * * * *
Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose; that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!
For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out of—nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into—nirvana, till all your future wakers shall cease to be!
It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers; saying, as he does so—
"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"
And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and retire—"Hélas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! … Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness, when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity. May it never quite go out—it need not! May you ever be able to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!