The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)

by Louis Figuier

WE will conclude our work by laying down certain practical rules which result from the facts and the principles that have been explained in its course.

Since man can raise himself to the range of a superhuman being only when his soul has acquired the necessary degree of purification in this life, it is evidently his interest to apply himself to the culture of his soul, to preserve it from every stain, to keep it from falling. Be good, generous, and compassionate; grateful for benefits, accessible to the suffering, the friend of the oppressed. Console those who suffer and who weep. Practise every form of charity. Endeavour to raise your thoughts above terrestrial things. Strive against those material instincts, which are the stigmata of human existence. Aspire to the good and the beautiful. Live in the most elevated spheres, those which are the least bound to lower things. It is only thus that you can elevate and ennoble your soul, and render it fit to enjoy the higher existence which awaits it in the ethereal spheres. For, if your soul be vicious and corrupt, if, during all your terrestrial life, you have been sunk in material interests, exclusively given up to purely physical occupations and enjoyments, which make you the fellow of the animals; if your heart has been hard, your conscience dumb, your instincts low and evil, you will be condemned to recommence a second existence on the earth. Once, or many times again you will have to bear the burthen of life on this disinherited globe, where physical suffering and moral evil have taken up their abode, where happiness is unknown, and unhappiness is the universal law.

There is another motive for our careful cultivation of the faculties of the soul, and for our constantly purifying ourselves by the practice of good. Noble and generous persons, elect souls, are, as we have said, the only ones capable of communicating with the dead, with the beloved beings whom they have lost. If, therefore, we be stained with moral evil, we shall not receive any communication, any succour from the beings who have left us, and whom we loved. This is a powerful motive for our constant striving towards perfection.

One of the most effectual means of perfecting and ennobling the soul, of raising it above terrestrial conditions, and bringing it near the higher spheres, is science. Study, labour to learn of nature, to comprehend the plans and the phenomena which surround you, to explain to yourselves the universe of which you form a portion, and your soul will grow in strength and wisdom. It is very sad to contemplate the shameful ignorance in which almost all humanity is sunk. The population of our globe numbers 1,300,000,000, and of all this multitude hardly 10,000,000 can be said to have studied the sciences, and really cultivated their minds. All the rest of mankind are abandoned to an intellectual passiveness, which almost reduces them to the level of the animals. The earth is but a vast field of ignorance. As far as knowledge is concerned, almost all men die as they were born, they have not added a single idea, a single branch of knowledge to those which their parents—themselves ignorant—have inculcated in their youth. Nevertheless, thanks to the labours of some few men of uncommon mind and energy, the knowledge we possess at the present time is immense, we have made great progress in the study of nature and its laws.

We understand the mechanism and the regulation of the universe, we have learned to reject the fallacious testimony of our senses, we have discerned the courses of the different stars, which look so much alike, when they shine in the firmament by night. We know that the sun is motionless in the centre of our world, and that a company of planets, among which the earth figures, revolve around him, in an orbit whose mathematical curve has been precisely fixed. We know the cause of the days and nights, as well as that of the seasons; we can predict almost to a second the return of the stars to a certain point of their orbit, their meetings, eclipses, and occultations. The globe which we inhabit has been surveyed and explored with care which has hardly missed a nook of it. We know the causes of the winds and of the rains, we can point out the exact course of the sea-currents, and foretell the hour and the height of the tides all over the globe. We know why glaciers exist at the northern and southern extremities of the earth, and why other glaciers crown the great mountain heights. The movements of the earth, which formerly produced chains of mountains, and which at present occasion volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, are quite comprehensible to us. The composition of all the bodies which exist on the surface, or are hidden in the depths of the earth, has been fixed with certainty.

We know what air contains, and what water is composed of. There is not a mineral, not a particle of earth to which we cannot assign its composition. More than that, we can tell what is the composition of the soil of the planets, and of their satellites, those stars which roll at incalculable distances above our heads, and which we can reach only with our eyes. Science has performed this miracle, the chemical analysis of bodies which it cannot touch, and which it can only see across millions of miles in space.

We have studied, classified, demonstrated all the living beings, animals and plants which people the earth. There is not an insect hidden in the grass of the fields which has not been described, which has not had its just place in creation assigned to it; there is not a blade of grass which has not been reproduced by the pencil of the naturalist.

Beyond all this, science has penetrated far beyond the reach of our vision. It has invented a marvellous instrument which has unveiled an entire world to our astonished gaze, a world whose existence we never should have suspected without its aid. The world thus revealed to us is that of infinitely little things. We know that myriads of living creatures, both animals and plants, exist in a drop of water; that those creatures, in all their prodigious littleness, have a complete existence, and are as well organized as those of great size which are analogous to them, and that the physiological functions of all these imperceptible beings are fulfilled as perfectly as our own.

Just as we have penetrated into the life of infinite littleness, so we have pierced the depths of celestial space, and scrutinized with our eyes the magnified image of the stars which revolve at an incalculable distance above us. The telescope shows us the surface of the moon, the depths of its ravines, and the rough serrated edges of its enormous mountains, furrowed with deep circular crevasses. We can cast our eyes over the lunar disc as if it were a distant landscape of our own globe. We can even, thanks to the magnifying powers of the telescope, form an idea of the aspect of the surfaces of those planets which are almost lost in the infinite distances of the heavens.

After this faint and incomplete sketch of that which human science has been able to accomplish, it might be supposed that every inhabitant of the earth is impatient to make all this knowledge his own, that every one must desire to fill his mind with its treasures. Alas! the great majority of the human species is ignorant of even the elements of all this. Take away the ten millions of individuals, to whom we have already alluded, and who, numerically, are hardly to be counted in considering the population of the globe, all people imagine that the earth is a flat surface which extends to the limits of the horizon, and is covered with a blue cupola, called heaven. If you assert that the earth revolves, they laugh, and point to the motionless earth, and the sun which rises on the right hand and sets on the left, a manifest proof that the sun comes and goes. The poets will have it that the sun rises from his bed in the morning, and returns to it in the evening. People believe that the stars which shine by night, in the celestial vault, are simply ornaments, an agreeable spectacle, made to please our eyes, and that the moon is a beacon. Nobody inquires into the causes of the rain or fine weather, of heat or cold, of the winds or the tides. Every one shuts his eyes to natural phenomena, so as to avoid the trouble of explaining them. Nature is a shut book for the majority of mankind, who live in the midst of the most curious and various phenomena, but who occupy themselves in eating and drinking, and trying to harm their fellows.