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?”
7
Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is supplied by our senses; and even the images and the words—which in reality are but images—by the aid of which it strives to sever itself from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could that mind remain what it was, when it has nothing left of that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall it carry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows itself only by favour of that body? A few memories of their common life? Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space and in unlimited time?
“But,” I shall be told, “there is more in us than our intelligence discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not placed there; we contain a greater being than the one we know.”
That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by the inconscient, that is to say, by that which represents the universe, is enormous and preponderant. But how shall the ego which we know and whose destiny alone concerns us recognize all those things and that greater being neither of which it has ever known? What will it do in the presence of that stranger? If I be told that the stranger is myself, I will readily agree; but was that which upon earth felt and weighed my joys and sorrows and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was that this impassive, unseen stranger who existed in me all unsuspected, even as I am probably about to live in him without his concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the sorry recollection of a thing that has ceased to be? Now that he has taken my place, while destroying, in order to acquire a larger consciousness, all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my head, not even brushing with their new-born wings the being which I am conscious of to-day?