“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”
I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it, but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but what will be for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or your God, while even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea only came to me yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity whose incomprehensibility has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.
5
It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no longer count; and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. The fact none the less remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations; at best, it is but a short space gained; and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to pass over what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now passing over what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing yet to tell us, or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw for ever and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.
CHAPTER IX
THE FATE OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
1
Let us dispense with their uncertain aid and endeavour to make our way to the other side alone. To return then to the theories which we were examining before these necessary digressions, it would seem that survival with our present consciousness is nearly as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover, even if it were admissible, it could not be dreadful. It is certain that, when the body disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear at the same time; for we cannot imagine a spirit suffering in a body which it no longer possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all that we call mental or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if we examine them well, spring from the ties and habits of our senses. Our spirit feels the reaction of the sufferings of our body, or of the bodies that surround it; it cannot suffer in itself or through itself. Slighted affection, shattered love, disappointments, failures, despair, betrayal, personal humiliations, as well as the sorrows and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire their potent sting only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own pain, which is the pain of not knowing, the spirit, once delivered from its flesh, could suffer only in the recollection of the flesh. It is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it has left behind on earth. But to its eyes, since it no longer reckons the days, these troubles will seem so brief that it will not grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and knowing whither they lead, it will not behold their severity.
The spirit is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits, when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend them.
2
It is now a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the bosom of infinity; and up to what point it is important that it should recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of to-day.