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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Death, by Maurice Maeterlinck, Translated by
+Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Death
+
+
+Author: Maurice Maeterlinck
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 22, 2010  [eBook #31354]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH***
+
+
+E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustration and decorations.
+      See 31354-h.htm or 31354-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31354/31354-h/31354-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31354/31354-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+DEATH
+
+by
+
+MAURICE MAETERLINCK
+
+Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+1912
+
+Copyright, 1911
+By Maurice Maeterlinck
+Published, January, 1912
+
+All rights reserved
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK IN
+UNIFORM STYLE AND BINDING
+
+ ESSAYS
+
+ THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
+ WISDOM AND DESTINY
+ THE LIFE OF THE BEE
+ THE BURIED TEMPLE
+ THE DOUBLE GARDEN
+ THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS
+ DEATH
+
+ PLAYS
+
+ SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
+ JOYZELLE AND MONNA VANNA
+ THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY
+ MARY MAGDALENE
+ PÉLLÉAS AND MÉLISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS
+ PRINCESS MALEINE
+ THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS
+ AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
+
+ HOLIDAY EDITIONS
+
+ The text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned
+ books.
+
+ OUR FRIEND THE DOG
+ OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS
+ THE SWARM
+ THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FLOWERS
+ CHRYSANTHEMUMS
+ THE LEAF OF OLIVE
+ THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+[Illustration: Camera Portrait by E. O. Hoppé, London]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                           PAGE
+
+      I OUR IDEA OF DEATH                           3
+
+     II A PRIMITIVE IDEA                            5
+
+    III WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR
+          IDEA OF DEATH                            10
+
+     IV WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH
+          GOES BEFORE                              12
+
+      V THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED
+          TO MAN ALONE                             14
+
+     VI THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGING
+          THE PANGS OF DEATH                       17
+
+    VII THEIR ARGUMENTS                            19
+
+   VIII THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH        21
+
+     IX THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO DO
+          NOT BELONG TO DEATH                      25
+
+      X WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN INTO
+          WHICH DEATH HURLS US, LET US FIRST
+          PUT RELIGIOUS FEARS FROM OUR MINDS       29
+
+     XI ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE                    33
+
+    XII THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS          37
+
+   XIII IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE                        39
+
+    XIV THE SAME, CONTINUED                        45
+
+     XV IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOT
+          BE DREADFUL                              48
+
+    XVI THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS         51
+
+   XVII THE SAME, CONTINUED                        54
+
+  XVIII THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME A
+         TORTURE                                   57
+
+    XIX A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND
+          DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY               60
+
+     XX THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH
+          OUR MIND                                 65
+
+    XXI INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR REASON        68
+
+   XXII INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR SENSES        71
+
+  XXIII WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE KNOW?            74
+
+   XXIV THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON
+          AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT                 77
+
+    XXV OUR FAITH IN INFINITY                      81
+
+   XXVI THE SAME, CONTINUED                        84
+
+  XXVII SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?                 87
+
+ XXVIII QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS?                 90
+
+   XXIX THE SAME, CONTINUED                        95
+
+    XXX IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER
+          THEM                                     99
+
+   XXXI EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT FROM
+          SUFFERING                               102
+
+
+
+
+DEATH
+
+
+
+
+ I
+
+ OUR IDEA OF DEATH
+
+
+It has been well said:
+
+"Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not
+some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is
+our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and
+now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield
+over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me--to me who am
+to die outright--of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there
+is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The
+rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of
+some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in
+the presence of death!"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Marie Lenéru, _Les Affranchis_, Act III.,
+Sc. iv.]
+
+
+
+
+ II
+
+ A PRIMITIVE IDEA
+
+
+That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
+our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
+our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
+thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press
+around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it
+battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory
+with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, though we
+think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning
+to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it,
+instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces,
+which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We
+deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one
+hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death,
+which should be the most perfect and the most luminous--being the most
+persistent and the most inevitable--remains the flimsiest of our ideas
+and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power
+which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes
+kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
+until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life
+arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength,
+I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among
+us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the
+depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of
+his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything
+has changed around it and when even that which composes it and
+upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched,
+rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of
+years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked
+upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no
+longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of
+the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery
+of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it
+may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens
+at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable.
+And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not
+raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or
+three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to
+lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last moments. In
+vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us
+and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last
+shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.
+
+
+
+
+ III
+
+ WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH
+ OUR IDEA OF DEATH
+
+
+It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death
+in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to
+learn to stand by it. He would say to death:
+
+"I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when
+my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is
+enough to prevent you from becoming my master."
+
+He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image
+against which the last agony would not prevail and in which the
+phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the
+terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he
+would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would
+be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid
+thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all,
+what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and
+disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?
+
+
+
+
+ IV
+
+ WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT
+ WHICH GOES BEFORE
+
+
+"The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making
+death grievous."
+
+Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the
+horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let
+us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
+Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is
+not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them.
+They form part of life and not of death. We easily forget the most
+cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of
+convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of
+pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the
+evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a
+reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death
+alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of
+science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse
+death because it puts an end to them.
+
+
+
+
+ V
+
+ THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE
+ ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE
+
+
+In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life,
+the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of
+men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and
+especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see
+approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls
+us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home
+of the only invincible terrors which the human soul has ever felt.
+
+It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We
+shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain
+faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into
+which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
+struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is
+the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and
+horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility
+of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already
+greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the
+sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider
+it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most
+excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at
+a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at
+their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so
+great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room
+for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their
+revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as
+the highest law of human conscience.
+
+
+
+
+ VI
+
+ THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN
+ PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH
+
+
+One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down
+to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
+long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act
+as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
+preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded
+that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is
+snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the
+mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to
+avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one.
+Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good
+Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding
+to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it
+is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of
+death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the
+agony.
+
+
+
+
+ VII
+
+ THEIR ARGUMENTS
+
+
+They, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of
+science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of
+death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
+insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not
+one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter.
+If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a
+few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not
+be the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, "an extended
+death," those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain.
+A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of
+tortures.
+
+Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we
+mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
+we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable
+pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts
+and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale
+that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick
+darkness of another world.
+
+
+
+
+ VIII
+
+ THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG
+ TO DEATH
+
+
+Increased by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes
+such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors' reasons. And yet
+there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree.
+They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to
+deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them
+would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate
+and, like misers, measure out drop by drop the clemency and peace
+which they grudge and which they ought to lavish, dreading lest they
+should weaken the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless
+and painful quiverings of life that does not wish to give place to the
+coming quiet.
+
+It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater
+daring. It is enough to state once more that all this does not concern
+death. It happens before it and below it. It is not the arrival of
+death, but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death,
+but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it
+is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten up from every
+side at the approach of death, but not at its call; and, though they
+gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of
+the fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? All those
+strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are
+on this same side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other
+side. They are, for that matter, accidental and temporary and emanate
+only from our ignorance. All our knowledge only helps us to die in
+greater pain than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when
+science will turn against its error and no longer hesitate to shorten
+our misfortunes. A day will come when it will dare and act with
+certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
+knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently
+every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and
+the sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no
+physical nor metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be
+as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be other
+things to consider, it will be possible to surround death with deeper
+delights and fairer dreams. Henceforth, in any case, once death is
+exonerated from all that goes before, it will be easier to face it
+without fear and to enlighten that which follows after.
+
+
+
+
+ IX
+
+ THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO
+ DO NOT BELONG TO DEATH
+
+
+Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it.
+The first has neither face nor shape and overshadows the whole region
+of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as
+powerful and strikes all our senses. Let us first examine the latter.
+
+Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
+to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing
+it the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that
+digs our graves and orders us to keep there that which was made to
+disappear? If we cannot think without horror of the fate of the
+beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because
+death carries the spirit to some place unknown, shall we reproach it
+with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us? Death descends
+upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by
+what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is
+gone. And it is already far away when we begin the frightful work
+which we try hard to prolong as much as we possibly can, as though we
+were persuaded that it is our only security against forgetfulness. I
+am well aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this
+proceeding is very innoxious. Looked upon from a sufficient height,
+decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a
+crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks
+our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to
+avoid the hateful test. Purified by fire, the memory lives in the
+heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth
+cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and
+happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our
+thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the
+imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and
+the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart, but
+also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the very
+background of life the great image upon which their eyes linger in
+consolation or despair.
+
+
+
+
+ X
+
+ WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN
+ INTO WHICH DEATH HURLS US,
+ LET US FIRST PUT RELIGIOUS
+ FEARS FROM OUR MINDS
+
+
+There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
+unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us not delay in
+putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left
+there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they
+are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not
+one of them brings us a proof before which a candid intelligence can
+bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for
+man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the
+proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best
+and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and
+fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things,
+that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should
+accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most
+ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty?
+He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even
+if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is
+buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less uncertain. If not by
+our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the
+accidents of race or birth, by some æsthetic or sentimental hazard? Or
+has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the
+understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If
+that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that
+does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He
+gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of
+the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns
+the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us,
+we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and
+incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an
+immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter
+loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of
+its Author.
+
+
+
+
+ XI
+
+ ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE
+
+
+Here we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
+which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was
+there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all
+that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific
+certainty to break through its darkness--for man has the right to hope
+for that which he does not yet conceive--the only point that interests
+us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual
+intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know
+whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.
+
+Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no
+more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day;
+survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with
+universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this
+world.
+
+Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity
+without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is
+dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out
+of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not
+a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there
+is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star
+extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where
+our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless
+road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not
+see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it
+into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exist,
+under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we
+try to analyze it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and
+expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny.
+It is as contrary to the nature of our reason and probably of all
+imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to
+infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of
+infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to
+enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind
+has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we
+call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and
+exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and
+increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any
+case--and this is what matters here--if nothingness were possible,
+since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.
+
+
+
+
+ XII
+
+ THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached
+this question in an essay on _Immortality_,[2] of which I will only
+reproduce an essential passage, contenting myself with supporting it
+with a few new considerations.
+
+[Footnote 2: This essay forms part of the volume published under the
+title of _The Measure of the Hours_.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]
+
+What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into
+the centre of the universe, the only point that matters in space
+and time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts
+independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without
+our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our
+body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is
+almost certain that an intellect devoid of senses, devoid of organs to
+create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that
+ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which derived
+from our sensibility all that gave it life.
+
+
+
+
+ XIII
+
+ IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE
+
+
+This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of
+its destruction, this ego is neither our mind nor our body, since
+we recognize that both are waves that flow away and are renewed
+incessantly. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or
+substance, for these are always in evolution, nor life, which is the
+cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for
+us to apprehend or define it, to tell where it dwells. When we try to
+go back to its last source, we find hardly more than a succession of
+memories, a series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled,
+attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our
+sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the
+surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of
+that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a
+somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one
+of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear
+the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. "As an
+English poet has very truly said, that which clamours aloud for
+eternity is the very part of me that will perish."
+
+It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious
+ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively,
+that every reality of our life disappears before this phantom. It is a
+matter of utter indifference to us that throughout eternity our body
+or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the
+most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume,
+beauty, light, air, star; it is likewise indifferent to us that our
+intellect should expand until it mixes with the life of the worlds,
+understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not
+affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves,
+unless that memory of a few almost always insignificant facts
+accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.
+
+"I care not," says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand
+nothing. "I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions
+of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses:
+they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network
+of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centre
+wherein lies the sensitive point which I feel to be all myself. They
+are now set loose, floating in space and time, and their fate is as
+unknown to me as that of the most distant constellations. Anything
+that occurs exists for me only upon condition that I be able to
+recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and
+precisely nowhere, which I turn like a mirror about this world whose
+phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it."
+
+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 words--which in
+reality are but images--by the aid of which it strives to tear itself
+from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How
+could that mind remain what it was when there is nothing left to it 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 grace of that body? A few memories of a
+life in common? 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?
+
+
+
+
+ XIV
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+"But," I shall be told, "there is more in us than the intellect
+discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not
+placed there; we contain a being superior to the one we know."
+
+That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by unconsciousness,
+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 superior being
+whom it has never known? What will it do in the presence of that
+stranger? If I be told that stranger is myself, I will readily agree;
+but was that which upon earth felt and measured my joys and sorrows
+and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me,
+was that this unmoved, unseen stranger who existed in me without my
+cognizance, even as I am probably about to live in him without his
+concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the pitiful
+recollection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my
+place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater 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 wings that which I feel myself
+to be to-day?
+
+
+
+
+ XV
+
+ IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD
+ NOT BE DREADFUL
+
+
+It seems, therefore, that a survival with our present consciousness is
+as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover,
+even if it were admissible, it would 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 soul 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 soul 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, treachery, personal humiliations, as well as the afflictions
+and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire the sting that hurts it
+only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own
+sorrow, which is the sorrow of not knowing, the soul, once delivered
+from its body, could suffer only at the recollection of that body. It
+is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it
+has left behind on earth. But, in the eyes of that which no longer
+counts the days, those troubles will seem so brief that it will not
+grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and whither they
+lead, it will not behold their severity.
+
+The soul 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 one is no longer bound by space and time, is already to
+transcend them.
+
+
+
+
+ XVI
+
+ THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT
+ CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+There remains but the survival without consciousness, or survival with
+a consciousness different from that of to-day.
+
+A survival without consciousness seems at first sight the most
+probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the
+other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful,
+therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most
+consistent with the present state of human thought, to set that limit
+to their anxiety there. They have nothing to dread; for every fear, if
+any remain, would, if we look into it carefully, deck itself with
+hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind,
+separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished,
+scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the
+great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without
+dreams and without awakening.
+
+But this is only a solution that flatters indolence. If we press those
+who speak of a survival without consciousness, we perceive that they
+mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and
+we have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of
+consciousness to persist in infinity.
+
+Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
+of the universe into which their own will fall. But that means solving
+very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
+night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
+man's brain.
+
+
+
+
+ XVII
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+This question is closely allied to our modified consciousness. There
+is for the moment no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in
+its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.
+
+Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
+one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as
+its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a
+form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look
+upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind
+will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad
+expectation that greets a birth. If, before being born, we were
+permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and
+a life that should not be completed by the magnificent hour of
+death, which of us, knowing what we ought to know, would accept
+the disquieting problem of an existence that would not end in the
+reassuring mystery of its conclusion? Which of us would care to come
+into a world where there is so little to learn, if he did not know
+that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best
+part of life is that it prepares this hour for us, that it is the one
+and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that incomparable
+mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be possible,
+because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where the
+worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we count among
+the number of the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost
+unimaginable that a thought can survive to mingle with the substance
+of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a
+waste of indifference, can be nothing but a sea of joy.
+
+
+
+
+ XVIII
+
+ THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME
+ A TORTURE
+
+
+Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to
+maintain their ego that they are calling down the sufferings which
+they dread. The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in
+so far as it is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger
+the ego, the narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The
+more painful too; for the mind, if it remain as we know it--and we are
+not able to imagine it different--will no sooner have seen its limits
+than it will wish to overstep them: and, the more separated it feels,
+the greater will be its longing to unite with that which lies outside.
+There will therefore be an eternal struggle between its being and its
+aspirations. And really there were no object in being born and dying
+only for the purpose of these endless contests. Have we not here yet
+one more proof that our ego, as we conceive it, could never subsist in
+the infinity where it must needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It
+behooves us therefore to get rid of imaginations that emanate only
+from our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight
+emanate only from low places. Pascal has said, once and for all: "The
+narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view."
+
+
+
+
+ XIX
+
+ A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND
+ DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY
+
+
+On the other hand--for we must be honest, probe the conflicting
+darkness which we believe nearest to the truth and show no bias--on
+the other hand, we can grant to those who are wedded to the thought
+of remaining as they are that the survival of a mere particle of
+themselves would suffice to renew them again in the heart of an
+infinity wherefrom their body no longer separates them. If it seems
+impossible that anything--a movement, a vibration, a radiation--should
+stop or disappear, why then should thought be lost? There will, no
+doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to allure the new
+ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it will find in
+that new and endless environment, just as the other ego, on this
+earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we
+have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it be
+impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to
+us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day;
+it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much
+more chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more foreign
+substance than any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a
+long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not
+become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its nucleus, of
+which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less
+concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on
+leaving our mother's womb transforms us to such a point that there is,
+so to speak, no connexion between the embryo that we were and the man
+that we have become, is it not right to think that the much newer,
+more unknown, wider and more fertile environment which we enter on
+quitting life will transform us even more? One can see in what happens
+to us here a figure of that which awaits us elsewhere and readily
+admit that our spiritual being, liberated from its body, if it does
+not mingle at the first onset with the infinite, will develop itself
+there gradually, will choose itself a substance and, no longer
+trammelled by space and time, will grow without end. It is very
+possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law of our
+future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts will
+welcome us on the other bank and that the quality of our intellect
+will determine that of the infinite that crystallizes around it. Every
+hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be addressed
+to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us. It
+finds no place in the human imagination that explores the future
+methodically. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
+over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
+worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
+will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
+be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
+this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of
+our destiny.
+
+
+
+
+ XX
+
+ THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH
+ OUR MIND
+
+
+We have said that the one sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of
+not knowing or not understanding, which contains the sorrow of
+powerlessness; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer
+paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he
+who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a
+mistake, which is not possible. I do not believe that another sorrow
+of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one which, before
+reflection, might seem admissible and which, in any case, could be
+but ephemeral would arise from the sight of the pain and misery that
+remain on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow, after all,
+would be but one side and an insignificant phase of the sorrow of
+powerlessness and of not understanding. As for the latter, though it
+is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at an
+insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it would be
+intolerable only if it were without hope. But, in order to be without
+hope, the universe would have to abandon any attempt to understand
+itself, or admit within itself an object that remained for ever
+foreign to it. Either the mind will not perceive its limits and,
+consequently, will not suffer from them, or else it will overstep them
+as it perceives them; for how could the universe have parts eternally
+condemned to form no part of itself and of its knowledge? Hence we
+cannot understand that the torture of not understanding, supposing it
+to exist for a moment, should not end by mingling with the state of
+infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we comprehend it, could be
+naught but an indifference higher and purer than joy.
+
+
+
+
+ XXI
+
+ INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR
+ REASON
+
+
+Let us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem extends beyond
+humanity and embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view
+infinity under two distinct aspects and try to foresee our fate
+therein. Let us contemplate the first of these aspects. We are plunged
+into a universe that has no limits in space or time. It never began,
+nor will it ever end. It could not have an aim, for, if it had one,
+it would have attained it in the infinity of years that preceded
+us. It is not making for anywhere, for it would have arrived there;
+consequently, all that the worlds within its pale, all that we
+ourselves do can have no influence upon it. If it have no thought,
+it will never have one. If it have one, that thought has been at its
+climax since all time and will remain there, changeless and immovable.
+It is as young as it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It
+has made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it
+will make in the future; and, as all the possible combinations have
+been exhausted since all time, it does not seem as if that which has
+not taken place in the eternity that extends before our birth can
+happen in that which will follow after our death. If it have not
+become conscious, it will never become so; if it know not what it
+wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or
+knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning.
+
+
+
+
+ XXII
+
+ INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR
+ SENSES
+
+
+All this would be, if not intelligible, at least acceptable to our
+reason; but in that universe float thousands of millions of worlds
+limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born
+again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that parts
+of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end.
+We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so
+infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going
+nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That
+which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems
+eternally to be making more or less unfortunate experiments. What
+is that which has already attained perfection trying to achieve?
+Everything that we discover in that which could not possibly have an
+aim looks as though it were pursuing one with inconceivable ardour;
+and the spirit that animates what we see in that which should know
+everything and possess itself seems to know nothing and to seek itself
+without intermission. Thus all that is apparent to our senses in
+infinity gainsays that which our reason is compelled to ascribe to
+it. According as we fathom it, we understand better the depth of our
+want of understanding; and, the more we strive to penetrate the two
+incomprehensibilities that stand face to face, the more they
+contradict each other.
+
+
+
+
+ XXIII
+
+ WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE
+ KNOW?
+
+
+What will become of us amid all this obscurity? Shall we leave the
+finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other
+infinite? In other words, shall we end by mingling with the infinite
+which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which
+our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral
+worlds? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and
+to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, since all
+eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists
+without either future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that
+surrounds us, from the unhappy experiments, to find our way at last
+into peace, wisdom, the changeless and boundless consciousness, or
+into the hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our
+senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both
+senses and intelligence illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of
+a brief hour that were never intended to probe or contend with the
+universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it
+and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, seeing that we
+understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable distance
+from those inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and irreducible
+and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain that
+falls upon the sea?
+
+
+
+
+ XXIV
+
+ THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON
+ AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT
+
+
+But, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between
+the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses
+is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe
+that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
+combination has been made; when we declare that there is not a chance
+that that which has not taken place in the uncountable past can take
+place in the uncountable future, our imagination attributes to the
+infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth,
+all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its
+disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie
+therein have not been exhausted in the eternity that goes before us
+any more than they could be in the eternity that comes after us. There
+is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It is
+probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day,
+that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what
+it wants. It is almost certain that its ideal is still veiled by the
+shadow of its immensity and almost evident that the experiments and
+chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds,
+compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more
+than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, it is very
+nearly sure that we ourselves, or whatever remains of us--it matters
+not--will profit one day by those experiments and those chances. That
+which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the best state,
+as well as the supreme wisdom which will recognize and establish it,
+is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstance. It were not
+at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the
+endeavour to form itself, had not yet met with the aid of the
+necessary chances and if human thought were seconding one of those
+decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his thought
+may appear, he has exactly the value of the most enormous forces that
+he is able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the
+immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the
+worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight
+and the same importance with regard to the universe that it has
+to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which
+comparisons do not reduce to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+ XXV
+
+ OUR FATE IN INFINITY
+
+
+Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
+absolute and perfect infinity--the changeless, immovable infinity
+which has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our
+reason tends--or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence,
+here below undeniable, of our senses--the infinity which seeks itself,
+which is still evolving and not yet established--it behoves us above
+all to foresee in it our fate, which, in any case, must end by
+absorption in that very infinity.
+
+The first infinity, the ideal infinity, is so strangely contrary to
+all that we see that it is best not to attack it until we have tried
+to explore the second. Moreover, it is quite possible that it may
+succeed the other. As we have said, that which has not taken place in
+the eternity before may happen in the eternity after us; and nothing
+save innumerous accidents is opposed to the prospect that the universe
+may at last acquire the integral consciousness that will establish it
+at its climax. After giving a glance, useless, for that matter, and
+impotent, at all that may perhaps arise, we shall try to interrogate,
+without hope of answer, the mystery of the boundless peace into which
+it is possible that we may sink with the other worlds.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVI
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar
+infinity, the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other
+things from our eyes, but could never be a total illusion. It seems to
+us to be peopled only with objects--planets, suns, stars, nebulæ,
+atoms, imponderous fluids--which move, unite and separate, repel and
+attract one another, which shrink and expand, displace one another
+incessantly and never arrive, which measure space in that which has
+no limit and number the hours in that which has no term. In a word,
+we are in an infinity that seems to have almost the same character,
+the same habits as that power in the midst of which we breathe and
+which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.
+
+What will be our fate in that infinity? It is not vain to ask one's
+self the question, even if we should mingle with it after losing all
+consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if our existence should be
+no more than a little substance without name, soul or matter--one
+cannot tell--suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces
+time and space. It is not vain to ask one's self the question, for we
+are concerned with the history of the worlds or of the universe; and
+this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
+great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
+incomparably better and vaster will end by finding us again some day.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVII
+
+ SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?
+
+
+Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider
+the habits of our nature and remember that we form part of a universe
+that has not yet collected its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that
+good and bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and
+that, when we have lost the agent of our sufferings, we shall not meet
+any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here;
+and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting
+derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in the unknowable that
+seeks itself hopelessly; will not our mind know here the frightful
+torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the
+last which the imagination can touch with its wing? Lastly, if there
+were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would still remain
+the matter and the spirit (or, at least, the obviously single force to
+which we give that double name) which composed them and whose fate
+must be no more indifferent to us than our own fate; for, let us
+repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of the universe becomes
+our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to ourselves:
+
+"What can it matter? We shall not be there."
+
+We shall be there always, because everything will be there.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVIII
+
+ QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS
+
+
+Will all this to which we shall belong, in a world ever seeking
+itself, continue a prey to new, unceasing and perhaps painful
+experiments? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the
+part that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that
+those unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
+more awkward and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
+shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
+others which should have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It
+is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows
+are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that they
+make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
+complete consciousness, a more just and serene principle of thought
+than on this earth and in the worlds which we perceive? And, if it be
+true that it has somewhere attained that better thought, why does the
+thought that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by
+it? Could no communication be possible between worlds which must have
+been born of the same idea and are steeped in it? What would be the
+mystery of that isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the
+most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can
+the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must
+it have struggled, to have come no farther than this? But, on the
+other hand, can it have been stayed by that darkness or by those
+obstacles which, being unable to arise from any elsewhere, can but
+have sprung from itself? Who then could have set those insoluble
+problems to infinity and from what more remote and profound region
+than itself would they have issued? Some one, after all, must know
+what they ask; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is not
+infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a
+will that leaves no point around it but what it fills entirely. Or are
+the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue
+of the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and to
+their pitiful consequences, according to the custom of nature, which
+knows nothing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as it
+does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again,
+is the whole question of our peace and happiness, like that of the
+fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the infinity of
+endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly,
+to come to the greatest probability, is it we who deceive ourselves,
+who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imperfect that
+which is perhaps faultless, we, who are but an infinitesimal fragment
+of the intelligence which we judge with the aid of the little shreds
+of thought which it has vouchsafed to lend us?
+
+
+
+
+ XXIX
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
+infinite and the invisible, we who neither understand nor even see the
+thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
+fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
+He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds
+which he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not
+perceive the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment
+when they are stopped by an object of the nature of those which his
+eye is accustomed to see upon this earth: were it otherwise, the whole
+space filled with innumerable suns and boundless forces, instead of
+being an abyss of absolute darkness which absorbs and extinguishes the
+clusters of beams that shoot across it from every side, would be but a
+prodigious, untenable ocean of flashes. Shakespeare's famous lines:
+
+     "There are more things in heaven and earth,
+           Horatio,
+     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
+
+have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer
+more things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is
+none but things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the
+unimaginable; and, if we do not even see the light, which is the only
+thing that we believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing
+all around us but the invisible.
+
+We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
+indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
+well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching,
+seeing or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it
+is, just as they would prevent us from understanding it, if an
+intelligence of a different order were to bethink itself of revealing
+or explaining it to us. It is impossible for us, therefore, to
+appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
+respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
+are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
+circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
+towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards
+that which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny
+confines is to struggle towards that which appears to us the best and
+to remain heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those
+confines can ever be wholly lost.
+
+
+
+
+ XXX
+
+ IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER
+ THEM
+
+
+But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From
+the point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way
+necessary that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the
+universe have already found its consciousness, whether it find it one
+day or see it everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of
+being unhappy and of suffering, neither in its entirety, nor in any
+one of its parts; and it matters little if the latter be invisible or
+incommensurable, considering that the smallest is as great as the
+greatest in what has neither limit nor measure. To torture a point
+is the same thing as to torture the worlds; and, if it torture the
+worlds, it is its own substance that it tortures. Its very destiny, in
+which we are placed, protects us. Our sufferings there could be but
+ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
+although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
+astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
+and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
+itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and
+its sole master; if not, the law or the master whom it must obey
+would then be the universe; and the centre of a word which we
+pronounce without being able to grasp its scope would be simply
+displaced. If it be unhappy, that means that it wills its own
+unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness, it is mad; and, if it appear
+to us mad, that means that our reason works contrary to everything and
+to the only laws possible, seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak
+more humbly, that it judges what it wholly fails to understand.
+
+
+
+
+ XXXI
+
+ EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT
+ FROM SUFFERING
+
+
+Everything, therefore, must finish, or perhaps everything already is,
+if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all
+suffering, all anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all,
+is our happiness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow,
+anxiety and unhappiness?
+
+But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where
+infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and
+unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it
+does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond
+its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our
+nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which
+could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken
+pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing
+hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we
+shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with
+their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that
+the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze,
+or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer
+from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant,
+seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the
+torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each
+many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulæ whose nature and
+dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we
+attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance
+working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be
+impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too
+cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but
+a trifle, a few papillæ more or less to our skin, the slightest
+modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the
+silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an
+unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to
+persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold
+are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals
+of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two
+enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each
+world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with
+another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent
+experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unexpected
+happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though
+they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
+another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
+that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is
+but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with
+wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable
+event....
+
+And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain
+motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity,
+nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so
+great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever
+prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing
+can impoverish.
+
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Death, by Maurice Maeterlinck, Translated by
+Alexander Teixeira de Mattos</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Death</p>
+<p>Author: Maurice Maeterlinck</p>
+<p>Release Date: February 22, 2010  [eBook #31354]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="300" height="500" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<h1>DEATH</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>MAURICE MAETERLINCK</h2>
+
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY</h4>
+
+<h3>ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS</h3>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;">
+<img src="images/title.jpg" width="100" height="92" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK</h4>
+<h3>DODD, MEAD &amp; COMPANY</h3>
+<h4>1912</h4>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1911<br />
+By <span class="smcap">Maurice Maeterlinck</span><br />
+Published, January, 1912<br />
+<br />
+<i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<div class="centerbox bbox"><p class="center">THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK IN<br />
+UNIFORM STYLE AND BINDING</p>
+
+<p class="center">ESSAYS</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Treasure of the Humble</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Wisdom and Destiny</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Life of the Bee</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Buried Temple</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Double Garden</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Measure of the Hours</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Death</span></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">PLAYS</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe Bleue</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Joyzelle and Monna Vanna</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">The Blue Bird, A Fairy Play</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Mary Magdalene</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">P&eacute;ll&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande, and Other Plays</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Princess Maleine</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">The Intruder, and Other Plays</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Aglavaine and Selysette</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">HOLIDAY EDITIONS</p>
+
+<p>The text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned
+books.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Our Friend the Dog</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Old-Fashioned Flowers</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Swarm</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Intelligence of the Flowers</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Chrysanthemums</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">The Leaf of Olive</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;"><span class="smcap">Thoughts from Maeterlinck</span></span></p></div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 283px;">
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="283" height="500" alt="Camera Portrait by E. O. Hopp&eacute;, London" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" width="80%" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="1" summary="CONTENTS">
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">CHAP.</td>
+<td align="left">&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">I</td>
+<td align="left">OUR IDEA OF DEATH</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#DEATH">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">II</td>
+<td align="left">A PRIMITIVE IDEA</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#II">5</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">III</td>
+<td align="left">WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">IDEA OF DEATH</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#III">10</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">IV</td>
+<td align="left">WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">GOES BEFORE</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#IV">12</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">V</td>
+<td align="left">THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">TO MAN ALONE</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#V">14</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">VI</td>
+<td align="left">THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGING<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">THE PANGS OF DEATH</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#VI">17</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">VII</td>
+<td align="left">THEIR ARGUMENT</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#VII">19</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">VIII</td>
+<td align="left">THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#VIII">21</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">IX</td>
+<td align="left">THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO DO<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">NOT BELONG TO DEATH</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#IX">25</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">X</td>
+<td align="left">WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN INTO<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">WHICH DEATH HURLS US, LET US FIRST</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">PUT RELIGIOUS FEARS FROM OUR MINDS</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#X">29</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XI</td>
+<td align="left">ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XI">33</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XII</td>
+<td align="left">THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XII">37</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XIII</td>
+<td align="left">IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XIII">39</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XIV</td>
+<td align="left">THE SAME, CONTINUED</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XIV">45</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XV</td>
+<td align="left">IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOT<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">BE DREADFUL</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XV">48</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XVI</td>
+<td align="left">THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XVI">51</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XVII</td>
+<td align="left">THE SAME, CONTINUED</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XVII">54</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XVIII</td>
+<td align="left">THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME A<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">TORTURE</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XVIII">57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XIX</td>
+<td align="left">A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XIX">60</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XX</td>
+<td align="left">THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">OUR MIND</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XX">65</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXI</td>
+<td align="left">INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR REASON</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXI">68</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXII</td>
+<td align="left">INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR SENSES</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXII">71</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXIII</td>
+<td align="left">WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE KNOW?</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXIII">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXIV</td>
+<td align="left">THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXIV">77</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXV</td>
+<td align="left">OUR FAITH IN INFINITY</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXV">81</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXVI</td>
+<td align="left">THE SAME, CONTINUED</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXVI">84</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXVII</td>
+<td align="left">SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXVII">87</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXVIII</td>
+<td align="left">QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS?</td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXVIII">90</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXIX</td>
+<td align="left">THE SAME, CONTINUED</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#XXIX">95</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXX</td>
+<td align="left">IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">THEM</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXX">99</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="top" align="right">XXXI</td>
+<td align="left">EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT FROM<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">SUFFERING</span></td>
+<td class="bottom" align="right"><a href="#XXXI">102</a></td></tr>
+
+</table></div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="DEATH" id="DEATH"></a>DEATH</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>OUR IDEA OF DEATH</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dci.jpg" title="I" height="80" width="73" alt="I" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">I</span>t has been well said:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not
+some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is
+our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and
+now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield
+over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me&mdash;to me who am
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>to die outright&mdash;of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there
+is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The
+rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of
+some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in
+the presence of death!&#8221;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>A PRIMITIVE IDEA</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>hat is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
+our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
+our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
+thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press
+around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it
+battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory
+with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>though we
+think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning
+to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it,
+instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces,
+which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We
+deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one
+hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death,
+which should be the most perfect and the most luminous&mdash;being the most
+persistent and the most inevitable&mdash;remains the flimsiest of our ideas
+and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power
+which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes
+kindled <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
+until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life
+arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength,
+I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among
+us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the
+depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of
+his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything
+has changed around it and when even that which composes it and upon
+which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched,
+rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of
+years ago. Our intelligence, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>grown so bold and active, has not worked
+upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no
+longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of
+the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery
+of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it
+may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens
+at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable.
+And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not
+raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or
+three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to
+lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>of the last moments. In
+vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us
+and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last
+shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH<br />
+OUR IDEA OF DEATH</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dci.jpg" title="I" height="80" width="73" alt="I" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">I</span>t were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death
+in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to
+learn to stand by it. He would say to death:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when
+my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is
+enough to prevent you from becoming my master.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>against
+which the last agony would not prevail and in which the
+phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the
+terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he
+would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would
+be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid
+thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all,
+what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and
+disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT<br />
+WHICH GOES BEFORE</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>he doctors and the priests,&#8221; said Napoleon, &#8220;have long been making
+death grievous.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the
+horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let
+us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
+Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is
+not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them.
+They form part of life and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>not of death. We easily forget the most
+cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of
+convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of
+pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the
+evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a
+reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death
+alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of
+science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse
+death because it puts an end to them.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE<br />
+ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dci.jpg" title="I" height="80" width="73" alt="I" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">I</span>n point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life,
+the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of
+men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and
+especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see
+approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls
+us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home
+of the only invincible terrors <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>which the human soul has ever felt.</p>
+
+<p>It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We
+shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain
+faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into
+which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
+struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the
+most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror,
+for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who,
+in Bossuet&#8217;s phrase, is &#8220;at bay with death,&#8221; is already greatly
+blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the
+sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>consider it
+their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most
+excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at a
+bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at
+their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so
+great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room
+for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their
+revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as
+the highest law of human conscience.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN<br />
+PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dco.jpg" title="O" height="80" width="64" alt="O" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">O</span>ne day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down
+to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
+long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act as
+though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
+preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded
+that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is
+snatched from the incomparably more <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>dreadful sufferings which the
+mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to avoid
+that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one.
+Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good
+Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding
+to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it
+is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of
+death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the
+agony.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THEIR ARGUMENTS</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>hey, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of
+science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of
+death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
+insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not
+one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter.
+If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a
+few days, or, at the utmost, a few <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>months of a life that will not be
+the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, &#8220;an extended
+death,&#8221; those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain. A
+single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of
+tortures.</p>
+
+<p>Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we
+mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
+we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable
+pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts
+and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale
+that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick
+darkness of another world.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG<br />
+TO DEATH</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dci.jpg" title="I" height="80" width="73" alt="I" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">I</span>ncreased by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes
+such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors&#8217; reasons. And yet
+there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree.
+They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to
+deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them
+would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate
+and, like misers, measure out drop <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>by drop the clemency and peace
+which they grudge and which they ought to lavish, dreading lest they
+should weaken the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless
+and painful quiverings of life that does not wish to give place to the
+coming quiet.</p>
+
+<p>It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater
+daring. It is enough to state once more that all this does not concern
+death. It happens before it and below it. It is not the arrival of
+death, but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death,
+but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it
+is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten up from every side
+at the approach of death, but not at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>its call; and, though they
+gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of the
+fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? All those
+strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are
+on this same side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other
+side. They are, for that matter, accidental and temporary and emanate
+only from our ignorance. All our knowledge only helps us to die in
+greater pain than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when
+science will turn against its error and no longer hesitate to shorten
+our misfortunes. A day will come when it will dare and act with
+certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
+knowing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently
+every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and the
+sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no
+physical nor metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be
+as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be other
+things to consider, it will be possible to surround death with deeper
+delights and fairer dreams. Henceforth, in any case, once death is
+exonerated from all that goes before, it will be easier to face it
+without fear and to enlighten that which follows after.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO<br />
+DO NOT BELONG TO DEATH</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcd.jpg" title="D" height="80" width="105" alt="D" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">D</span>eath, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it.
+The first has neither face nor shape and overshadows the whole region
+of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as
+powerful and strikes all our senses. Let us first examine the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
+to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing
+it the same injustice at its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>going as at its coming. Is it death that
+digs our graves and orders us to keep there that which was made to
+disappear? If we cannot think without horror of the fate of the
+beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because
+death carries the spirit to some place unknown, shall we reproach it
+with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us? Death descends
+upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by
+what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is
+gone. And it is already far away when we begin the frightful work
+which we try hard to prolong as much as we possibly can, as though we
+were persuaded that it is our only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>security against forgetfulness. I
+am well aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this
+proceeding is very innoxious. Looked upon from a sufficient height,
+decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a
+crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks
+our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to
+avoid the hateful test. Purified by fire, the memory lives in the
+heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth
+cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and
+happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our
+thoughts together with our bodies. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>figure of death, in the
+imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and
+the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart, but
+also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the very
+background of life the great image upon which their eyes linger in
+consolation or despair.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN<br />
+INTO WHICH DEATH HURLS US,<br />
+LET US FIRST PUT RELIGIOUS<br />
+FEARS FROM OUR MINDS</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>here is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
+unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us not delay in
+putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left
+there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they
+are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not
+one of them brings us a proof before <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>which a candid intelligence can
+bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for
+man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the
+proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best
+and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and
+fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things,
+that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should
+accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most
+ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty?
+He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even
+if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is
+buttressed by prophecies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>and miracles no less uncertain. If not by
+our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the
+accidents of race or birth, by some &aelig;sthetic or sentimental hazard? Or
+has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the
+understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If
+that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that
+does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He
+gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of
+the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns
+the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us,
+we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>cruel and
+incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an
+immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter
+loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of
+its Author.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dch.jpg" title="H" height="80" width="106" alt="H" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">H</span>ere we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
+which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was
+there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all
+that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific
+certainty to break through its darkness&mdash;for man has the right to hope
+for that which he does not yet conceive&mdash;the only point that interests
+us, because it is situated in the little circle which our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>actual
+intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know
+whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no
+more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day;
+survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with
+universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity
+without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is
+dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out
+of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>our flesh, not
+a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there
+is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star
+extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where
+our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless
+road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not
+see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it
+into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exist,
+under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we try to
+analyze it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and
+expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny.
+It is as contrary to the nature of our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>reason and probably of all
+imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to
+infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of
+infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to
+enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind
+has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we
+call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and
+exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and
+increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any
+case&mdash;and this is what matters here&mdash;if nothingness were possible,
+since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcn.jpg" title="N" height="80" width="150" alt="N" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">N</span>ext comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached
+this question in an essay on <i>Immortality</i>,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> of which I will only
+reproduce an essential passage, contenting myself with supporting it
+with a few new considerations.</p>
+
+<p>What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into the
+centre of the universe, the only point that matters in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>space and
+time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts
+independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without
+our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our
+body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is
+almost certain that an intellect devoid of senses, devoid of organs to
+create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that
+ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which derived
+from our sensibility all that gave it life.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>his ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of
+its destruction, this ego is neither our mind nor our body, since we
+recognize that both are waves that flow away and are renewed
+incessantly. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or
+substance, for these are always in evolution, nor life, which is the
+cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for
+us to apprehend or define it, to tell where it dwells. When we try to
+go back <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>to its last source, we find hardly more than a succession of
+memories, a series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled,
+attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our
+sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the
+surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of
+that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a
+somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one
+of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear
+the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. &#8220;As an
+English poet has very truly said, that which clamours aloud for
+eternity is the very part of me that will perish.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p><p>It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious
+ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively,
+that every reality of our life disappears before this phantom. It is a
+matter of utter indifference to us that throughout eternity our body
+or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the
+most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume,
+beauty, light, air, star; it is likewise indifferent to us that our
+intellect should expand until it mixes with the life of the worlds,
+understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not
+affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves,
+unless that memory of a few almost <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>always insignificant facts
+accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I care not,&#8221; says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand
+nothing. &#8220;I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions
+of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses:
+they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network
+of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centre
+wherein lies the sensitive point which I feel to be all myself. They
+are now set loose, floating in space and time, and their fate is as
+unknown to me as that of the most distant constellations. Anything
+that occurs exists for me only upon condition that I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>be able to
+recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and
+precisely nowhere, which I turn like a mirror about this world whose
+phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>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 words&mdash;which in
+reality are but images&mdash;by the aid of which it strives to tear itself
+from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How
+could that mind remain what it was when there is nothing left to it of
+that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall
+it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>carry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing
+that it knows itself only by grace of that body? A few memories of a
+life in common? 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?</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAME, CONTINUED</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcb.jpg" title="B" height="80" width="95" alt="B" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">B</span>ut,&#8221; I shall be told, &#8220;there is more in us than the intellect
+discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not
+placed there; we contain a being superior to the one we know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by unconsciousness,
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>that superior being
+whom it has never known? What will it do in the presence of that
+stranger? If I be told that stranger is myself, I will readily agree;
+but was that which upon earth felt and measured my joys and sorrows
+and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was
+that this unmoved, unseen stranger who existed in me without my
+cognizance, even as I am probably about to live in him without his
+concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the pitiful
+recollection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my
+place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater consciousness,
+all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another
+life <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my
+head, not even brushing with their new wings that which I feel myself
+to be to-day?</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD<br />
+NOT BE DREADFUL</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dci.jpg" title="I" height="80" width="73" alt="I" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">I</span>t seems, therefore, that a survival with our present consciousness is
+as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover,
+even if it were admissible, it would 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 soul suffering in a body
+which it no longer possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all
+that we call mental or moral sufferings, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>seeing that all of them, if
+we examine them well, spring from the ties and habits of our senses.
+Our soul 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, treachery, personal humiliations, as well as the afflictions
+and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire the sting that hurts it
+only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own
+sorrow, which is the sorrow of not knowing, the soul, once delivered
+from its body, could suffer only at the recollection of that body. It
+is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it
+has left behind <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>on earth. But, in the eyes of that which no longer
+counts the days, those troubles will seem so brief that it will not
+grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and whither they
+lead, it will not behold their severity.</p>
+
+<p>The soul 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 one is no longer bound by space and time, is already to
+transcend them.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT<br />
+CONSCIOUSNESS</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>here remains but the survival without consciousness, or survival with
+a consciousness different from that of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>A survival without consciousness seems at first sight the most
+probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the
+other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful,
+therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most
+consistent with the present state of human thought, to set <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>that limit
+to their anxiety there. They have nothing to dread; for every fear, if
+any remain, would, if we look into it carefully, deck itself with
+hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind,
+separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished,
+scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the
+great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without
+dreams and without awakening.</p>
+
+<p>But this is only a solution that flatters indolence. If we press those
+who speak of a survival without consciousness, we perceive that they
+mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and
+we have just seen that it is almost impossible <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>for that manner of
+consciousness to persist in infinity.</p>
+
+<p>Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
+of the universe into which their own will fall. But that means solving
+very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
+night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
+man&#8217;s brain.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAME, CONTINUED</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dct.jpg" title="T" height="80" width="108" alt="T" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">T</span>his question is closely allied to our modified consciousness. There
+is for the moment no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in
+its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.</p>
+
+<p>Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
+one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as
+its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a
+form of life which we do not yet understand; let us <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>learn to look
+upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind
+will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad
+expectation that greets a birth. If, before being born, we were
+permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and a
+life that should not be completed by the magnificent hour of death,
+which of us, knowing what we ought to know, would accept the
+disquieting problem of an existence that would not end in the
+reassuring mystery of its conclusion? Which of us would care to come
+into a world where there is so little to learn, if he did not know
+that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best
+part of life is that it prepares this hour <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>for us, that it is the one
+and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that incomparable
+mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be possible,
+because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where the
+worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we count among
+the number of the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost
+unimaginable that a thought can survive to mingle with the substance
+of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a
+waste of indifference, can be nothing but a sea of joy.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME<br />
+A TORTURE</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcb.jpg" title="B" height="80" width="95" alt="B" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">B</span>efore fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to
+maintain their ego that they are calling down the sufferings which
+they dread. The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in
+so far as it is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger
+the ego, the narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The
+more painful too; for the mind, if it remain as we know it&mdash;and we are
+not able to imagine it different<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>&mdash;will no sooner have seen its limits
+than it will wish to overstep them: and, the more separated it feels,
+the greater will be its longing to unite with that which lies outside.
+There will therefore be an eternal struggle between its being and its
+aspirations. And really there were no object in being born and dying
+only for the purpose of these endless contests. Have we not here yet
+one more proof that our ego, as we conceive it, could never subsist in
+the infinity where it must needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It
+behooves us therefore to get rid of imaginations that emanate only
+from our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight
+emanate only from low places. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>Pascal has said, once and for all: &#8220;The
+narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND<br />
+DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dco.jpg" title="O" height="80" width="64" alt="O" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">O</span>n the other hand&mdash;for we must be honest, probe the conflicting
+darkness which we believe nearest to the truth and show no bias&mdash;on
+the other hand, we can grant to those who are wedded to the thought of
+remaining as they are that the survival of a mere particle of
+themselves would suffice to renew them again in the heart of an
+infinity wherefrom their body no longer separates them. If it seems
+impossible that anything&mdash;a movement, a vibration, a radiation&mdash;should
+stop or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>disappear, why then should thought be lost? There will, no
+doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to allure the new
+ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it will find in
+that new and endless environment, just as the other ego, on this
+earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we
+have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it be
+impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to
+us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day; it
+is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much more
+chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more foreign
+substance than any inborn substance which it contained. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>It is but a
+long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not
+become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its nucleus, of
+which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less
+concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on
+leaving our mother&#8217;s womb transforms us to such a point that there is,
+so to speak, no connexion between the embryo that we were and the man
+that we have become, is it not right to think that the much newer,
+more unknown, wider and more fertile environment which we enter on
+quitting life will transform us even more? One can see in what happens
+to us here a figure of that which awaits us elsewhere and readily
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>admit that our spiritual being, liberated from its body, if it does
+not mingle at the first onset with the infinite, will develop itself
+there gradually, will choose itself a substance and, no longer
+trammelled by space and time, will grow without end. It is very
+possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law of our
+future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts will
+welcome us on the other bank and that the quality of our intellect
+will determine that of the infinite that crystallizes around it. Every
+hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be addressed
+to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us. It finds
+no place in the human imagination that explores <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>the future
+methodically. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
+over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
+worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
+will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
+be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
+this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of
+our destiny.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH<br />
+OUR MIND</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcw.jpg" title="W" height="80" width="153" alt="W" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">W</span>e have said that the one sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of not
+knowing or not understanding, which contains the sorrow of
+powerlessness; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer
+paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he
+who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a
+mistake, which is not possible. I do not believe that another sorrow
+of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one which, before
+reflection, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>might seem admissible and which, in any case, could be
+but ephemeral would arise from the sight of the pain and misery that
+remain on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow, after all,
+would be but one side and an insignificant phase of the sorrow of
+powerlessness and of not understanding. As for the latter, though it
+is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at an
+insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it would be
+intolerable only if it were without hope. But, in order to be without
+hope, the universe would have to abandon any attempt to understand
+itself, or admit within itself an object that remained for ever
+foreign to it. Either the mind will <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>not perceive its limits and,
+consequently, will not suffer from them, or else it will overstep them
+as it perceives them; for how could the universe have parts eternally
+condemned to form no part of itself and of its knowledge? Hence we
+cannot understand that the torture of not understanding, supposing it
+to exist for a moment, should not end by mingling with the state of
+infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we comprehend it, could be
+naught but an indifference higher and purer than joy.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR<br />
+REASON</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcl.jpg" title="L" height="80" width="70" alt="L" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">L</span>et us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem extends beyond
+humanity and embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view
+infinity under two distinct aspects and try to foresee our fate
+therein. Let us contemplate the first of these aspects. We are plunged
+into a universe that has no limits in space or time. It never began,
+nor will it ever end. It could not have an aim, for, if it had one, it
+would have attained it in the infinity of years <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>that preceded us. It
+is not making for anywhere, for it would have arrived there;
+consequently, all that the worlds within its pale, all that we
+ourselves do can have no influence upon it. If it have no thought, it
+will never have one. If it have one, that thought has been at its
+climax since all time and will remain there, changeless and immovable.
+It is as young as it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It
+has made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it
+will make in the future; and, as all the possible combinations have
+been exhausted since all time, it does not seem as if that which has
+not taken place in the eternity that extends before our birth can
+happen in that which will follow after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>our death. If it have not
+become conscious, it will never become so; if it know not what it
+wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or
+knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR<br />
+SENSES</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dca.jpg" title="A" height="80" width="90" alt="A" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">A</span>ll this would be, if not intelligible, at least acceptable to our
+reason; but in that universe float thousands of millions of worlds
+limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born
+again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that parts
+of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end.
+We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so
+infinite that in our eyes they <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>fill all infinity. That which is going
+nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That
+which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems
+eternally to be making more or less unfortunate experiments. What is
+that which has already attained perfection trying to achieve?
+Everything that we discover in that which could not possibly have an
+aim looks as though it were pursuing one with inconceivable ardour;
+and the spirit that animates what we see in that which should know
+everything and possess itself seems to know nothing and to seek itself
+without intermission. Thus all that is apparent to our senses in
+infinity gainsays that which our reason is compelled to ascribe to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>it. According as we fathom it, we understand better the depth of our
+want of understanding; and, the more we strive to penetrate the two
+incomprehensibilities that stand face to face, the more they
+contradict each other.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE<br />
+KNOW?</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcw.jpg" title="W" height="80" width="153" alt="W" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">W</span>hat will become of us amid all this obscurity? Shall we leave the
+finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other
+infinite? In other words, shall we end by mingling with the infinite
+which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which
+our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral
+worlds? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and
+to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>since all
+eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists
+without either future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that
+surrounds us, from the unhappy experiments, to find our way at last
+into peace, wisdom, the changeless and boundless consciousness, or
+into the hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our
+senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both
+senses and intelligence illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of a
+brief hour that were never intended to probe or contend with the
+universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it
+and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, seeing that we
+understand almost nothing? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>Is truth not at an immeasurable distance
+from those inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and irreducible
+and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain that
+falls upon the sea?</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON<br />
+AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcb.jpg" title="B" height="80" width="95" alt="B" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">B</span>ut, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between
+the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses
+is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe
+that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
+combination has been made; when we declare that there is not a chance
+that that which has not taken place in the uncountable past can take
+place in the uncountable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>future, our imagination attributes to the
+infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth,
+all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its
+disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie
+therein have not been exhausted in the eternity that goes before us
+any more than they could be in the eternity that comes after us. There
+is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It is
+probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day,
+that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what
+it wants. It is almost certain that its ideal is still veiled by the
+shadow of its immensity and almost evident that the experiments <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>and
+chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds,
+compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more
+than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, it is very
+nearly sure that we ourselves, or whatever remains of us&mdash;it matters
+not&mdash;will profit one day by those experiments and those chances. That
+which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the best state,
+as well as the supreme wisdom which will recognize and establish it,
+is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstance. It were not
+at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the
+endeavour to form itself, had not yet met with the aid of the
+necessary chances and if human <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>thought were seconding one of those
+decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his thought
+may appear, he has exactly the value of the most enormous forces that
+he is able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the
+immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the
+worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight
+and the same importance with regard to the universe that it has
+to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which
+comparisons do not reduce to nothing.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+<h3>OUR FATE IN INFINITY</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcw.jpg" title="W" height="80" width="153" alt="W" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">W</span>hatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
+absolute and perfect infinity&mdash;the changeless, immovable infinity
+which has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our
+reason tends&mdash;or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence,
+here below undeniable, of our senses&mdash;the infinity which seeks itself,
+which is still evolving and not yet established&mdash;it behoves us above
+all to foresee in it our fate, which, in any case, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>must end by
+absorption in that very infinity.</p>
+
+<p>The first infinity, the ideal infinity, is so strangely contrary to
+all that we see that it is best not to attack it until we have tried
+to explore the second. Moreover, it is quite possible that it may
+succeed the other. As we have said, that which has not taken place in
+the eternity before may happen in the eternity after us; and nothing
+save innumerous accidents is opposed to the prospect that the universe
+may at last acquire the integral consciousness that will establish it
+at its climax. After giving a glance, useless, for that matter, and
+impotent, at all that may perhaps arise, we shall try to interrogate,
+without hope of answer, the mystery of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>boundless peace into which
+it is possible that we may sink with the other worlds.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAME, CONTINUED</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcb.jpg" title="B" height="80" width="95" alt="B" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">B</span>ehold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar
+infinity, the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other
+things from our eyes, but could never be a total illusion. It seems to
+us to be peopled only with objects&mdash;planets, suns, stars, nebul&aelig;,
+atoms, imponderous fluids&mdash;which move, unite and separate, repel and
+attract one another, which shrink and expand, displace one another
+incessantly and never arrive, which measure space in that which has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>no limit and number the hours in that which has no term. In a word,
+we are in an infinity that seems to have almost the same character,
+the same habits as that power in the midst of which we breathe and
+which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.</p>
+
+<p>What will be our fate in that infinity? It is not vain to ask one&#8217;s
+self the question, even if we should mingle with it after losing all
+consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if our existence should be
+no more than a little substance without name, soul or matter&mdash;one
+cannot tell&mdash;suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces
+time and space. It is not vain to ask one&#8217;s self the question, for we
+are concerned with the history of the worlds or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>of the universe; and
+this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
+great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
+incomparably better and vaster will end by finding us again some day.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcs.jpg" title="S" height="80" width="95" alt="S" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">S</span>hall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider
+the habits of our nature and remember that we form part of a universe
+that has not yet collected its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that
+good and bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and
+that, when we have lost the agent of our sufferings, we shall not meet
+any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here;
+and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>drifting
+derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in the unknowable that
+seeks itself hopelessly; will not our mind know here the frightful
+torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the
+last which the imagination can touch with its wing? Lastly, if there
+were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would still remain
+the matter and the spirit (or, at least, the obviously single force to
+which we give that double name) which composed them and whose fate
+must be no more indifferent to us than our own fate; for, let us
+repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of the universe becomes
+our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to ourselves:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p><p>&#8220;What can it matter? We shall not be there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>We shall be there always, because everything will be there.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcw.jpg" title="W" height="80" width="153" alt="W" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">W</span>ill all this to which we shall belong, in a world ever seeking
+itself, continue a prey to new, unceasing and perhaps painful
+experiments? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the
+part that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that
+those unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
+more awkward and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
+shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>of
+others which should have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It
+is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows
+are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that they
+make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
+complete consciousness, a more just and serene principle of thought
+than on this earth and in the worlds which we perceive? And, if it be
+true that it has somewhere attained that better thought, why does the
+thought that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by
+it? Could no communication be possible between worlds which must have
+been born of the same idea and are steeped in it? What would be the
+mystery of that isolation? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>Are we to believe that the earth marks the
+most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can
+the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must
+it have struggled, to have come no farther than this? But, on the
+other hand, can it have been stayed by that darkness or by those
+obstacles which, being unable to arise from any elsewhere, can but
+have sprung from itself? Who then could have set those insoluble
+problems to infinity and from what more remote and profound region
+than itself would they have issued? Some one, after all, must know
+what they ask; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is not
+infinity itself, it is impossible to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>imagine a malignant will in a
+will that leaves no point around it but what it fills entirely. Or are
+the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue
+of the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and to
+their pitiful consequences, according to the custom of nature, which
+knows nothing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as it
+does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again,
+is the whole question of our peace and happiness, like that of the
+fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the infinity of
+endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly,
+to come to the greatest probability, is it we who deceive <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>ourselves,
+who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imperfect that
+which is perhaps faultless, we, who are but an infinitesimal fragment
+of the intelligence which we judge with the aid of the little shreds
+of thought which it has vouchsafed to lend us?</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAME, CONTINUED</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dch.jpg" title="H" height="80" width="106" alt="H" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">H</span>ow could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
+infinite and the invisible, we who neither understand nor even see the
+thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
+fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
+He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds
+which he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not
+perceive the immense rays that cross the heavens save <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>at the moment
+when they are stopped by an object of the nature of those which his
+eye is accustomed to see upon this earth: were it otherwise, the whole
+space filled with innumerable suns and boundless forces, instead of
+being an abyss of absolute darkness which absorbs and extinguishes the
+clusters of beams that shoot across it from every side, would be but a
+prodigious, untenable ocean of flashes. Shakespeare&#8217;s famous lines:</p>
+
+<div class="centerbox2 bbox2"><p>&#8220;There are more things in heaven and earth,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Horatio,</span><br />
+Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer more
+things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is none but
+things which it cannot <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>dream of, there is nothing but the
+unimaginable; and, if we do not even see the light, which is the only
+thing that we believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing
+all around us but the invisible.</p>
+
+<p>We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
+indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
+well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching,
+seeing or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is,
+just as they would prevent us from understanding it, if an
+intelligence of a different order were to bethink itself of revealing
+or explaining it to us. It is impossible for us, therefore, to
+appreciate in any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
+respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
+are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
+circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
+towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards
+that which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny
+confines is to struggle towards that which appears to us the best and
+to remain heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those
+confines can ever be wholly lost.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+<h3>IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER<br />
+THEM</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dcb.jpg" title="B" height="80" width="95" alt="B" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">B</span>ut let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From
+the point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way
+necessary that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the
+universe have already found its consciousness, whether it find it one
+day or see it everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of
+being unhappy and of suffering, neither in its entirety, nor in any
+one of its parts; and it matters little if <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>the latter be invisible or
+incommensurable, considering that the smallest is as great as the
+greatest in what has neither limit nor measure. To torture a point is
+the same thing as to torture the worlds; and, if it torture the
+worlds, it is its own substance that it tortures. Its very destiny, in
+which we are placed, protects us. Our sufferings there could be but
+ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
+although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
+astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
+and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
+itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and
+its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>sole master; if not, the law or the master whom it must obey
+would then be the universe; and the centre of a word which we
+pronounce without being able to grasp its scope would be simply
+displaced. If it be unhappy, that means that it wills its own
+unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness, it is mad; and, if it appear
+to us mad, that means that our reason works contrary to everything and
+to the only laws possible, seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak
+more humbly, that it judges what it wholly fails to understand.</p>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/doodad.jpg" width="500" height="48" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="gap">&#160;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3>EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT<br />
+FROM SUFFERING</h3>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/dce.jpg" title="E" height="80" width="67" alt="E" /></div>
+<p><span class="cap">E</span>verything, therefore, must finish, or perhaps everything already is,
+if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all
+suffering, all anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all,
+is our happiness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow,
+anxiety and unhappiness?</p>
+
+<p>But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity
+is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and
+unhappiness is something so <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>special, so human, so fragile that it
+does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond
+its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our
+nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which
+could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken
+pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing
+hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we
+shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with
+their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that
+the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze,
+or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant,
+seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the
+torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each
+many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebul&aelig; whose nature and
+dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we
+attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance
+working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be
+impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold.
+It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a
+trifle, a few papill&aelig; more or less to our skin, the slightest
+modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>temperature, the
+silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an
+unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to
+persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold
+are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals
+of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two
+enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world
+dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another
+world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent
+experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unexpected
+happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though
+they freeze or flame, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
+another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
+that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is
+but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with
+wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable
+event....</p>
+
+<p>And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain
+motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity,
+nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so
+great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever
+prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing
+can impoverish.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Footnotes:</span></h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Marie Len&eacute;ru, <i>Les Affranchis</i>, Act <span class="smcap">III.</span>, Sc. iv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> This essay forms part of the volume published under the
+title of <i>The Measure of the Hours</i>.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Translator&#8217;s Note.</span></p></div>
+
+<hr class="large" />
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Transcriber&#8217;s Note:</span></h3>
+
+<p>Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters&#8217; errors; otherwise
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author&#8217;s words and
+intent.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH***</p>
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@@ -0,0 +1,1763 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Death, by Maurice Maeterlinck, Translated by
+Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Death
+
+
+Author: Maurice Maeterlinck
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 22, 2010  [eBook #31354]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH***
+
+
+E-text prepared by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustration and decorations.
+      See 31354-h.htm or 31354-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31354/31354-h/31354-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31354/31354-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+DEATH
+
+by
+
+MAURICE MAETERLINCK
+
+Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+1912
+
+Copyright, 1911
+By Maurice Maeterlinck
+Published, January, 1912
+
+All rights reserved
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK IN
+UNIFORM STYLE AND BINDING
+
+ ESSAYS
+
+ THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE
+ WISDOM AND DESTINY
+ THE LIFE OF THE BEE
+ THE BURIED TEMPLE
+ THE DOUBLE GARDEN
+ THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS
+ DEATH
+
+ PLAYS
+
+ SISTER BEATRICE AND ARDIANE AND BARBE BLEUE
+ JOYZELLE AND MONNA VANNA
+ THE BLUE BIRD, A FAIRY PLAY
+ MARY MAGDALENE
+ PELLEAS AND MELISANDE, AND OTHER PLAYS
+ PRINCESS MALEINE
+ THE INTRUDER, AND OTHER PLAYS
+ AGLAVAINE AND SELYSETTE
+
+ HOLIDAY EDITIONS
+
+ The text in each case is an extract from one of the above mentioned
+ books.
+
+ OUR FRIEND THE DOG
+ OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS
+ THE SWARM
+ THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE FLOWERS
+ CHRYSANTHEMUMS
+ THE LEAF OF OLIVE
+ THOUGHTS FROM MAETERLINCK
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+[Illustration: Camera Portrait by E. O. Hoppe, London]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                           PAGE
+
+      I OUR IDEA OF DEATH                           3
+
+     II A PRIMITIVE IDEA                            5
+
+    III WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH OUR
+          IDEA OF DEATH                            10
+
+     IV WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT WHICH
+          GOES BEFORE                              12
+
+      V THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE ATTRIBUTED
+          TO MAN ALONE                             14
+
+     VI THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN PROLONGING
+          THE PANGS OF DEATH                       17
+
+    VII THEIR ARGUMENTS                            19
+
+   VIII THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG TO DEATH        21
+
+     IX THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO DO
+          NOT BELONG TO DEATH                      25
+
+      X WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN INTO
+          WHICH DEATH HURLS US, LET US FIRST
+          PUT RELIGIOUS FEARS FROM OUR MINDS       29
+
+     XI ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE                    33
+
+    XII THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS          37
+
+   XIII IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE                        39
+
+    XIV THE SAME, CONTINUED                        45
+
+     XV IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD NOT
+          BE DREADFUL                              48
+
+    XVI THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS         51
+
+   XVII THE SAME, CONTINUED                        54
+
+  XVIII THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME A
+         TORTURE                                   57
+
+    XIX A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND
+          DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY               60
+
+     XX THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH
+          OUR MIND                                 65
+
+    XXI INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR REASON        68
+
+   XXII INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR SENSES        71
+
+  XXIII WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE KNOW?            74
+
+   XXIV THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON
+          AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT                 77
+
+    XXV OUR FAITH IN INFINITY                      81
+
+   XXVI THE SAME, CONTINUED                        84
+
+  XXVII SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?                 87
+
+ XXVIII QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS?                 90
+
+   XXIX THE SAME, CONTINUED                        95
+
+    XXX IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER
+          THEM                                     99
+
+   XXXI EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT FROM
+          SUFFERING                               102
+
+
+
+
+DEATH
+
+
+
+
+ I
+
+ OUR IDEA OF DEATH
+
+
+It has been well said:
+
+"Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not
+some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is
+our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and
+now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield
+over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me--to me who am
+to die outright--of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there
+is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The
+rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of
+some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in
+the presence of death!"[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Marie Leneru, _Les Affranchis_, Act III.,
+Sc. iv.]
+
+
+
+
+ II
+
+ A PRIMITIVE IDEA
+
+
+That is where we stand. For us, death is the one event that counts in
+our life and in our universe. It is the point whereat all that escapes
+our vigilance unites and conspires against our happiness. The more our
+thoughts struggle to turn away from it, the closer do they press
+around it. The more we dread it, the more dreadful it becomes, for it
+battens but on our fears. He who seeks to forget it burdens his memory
+with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. But, though we
+think of death incessantly, we do so unconsciously, without learning
+to know death. We compel our attention to turn its back upon it,
+instead of going to it with uplifted head. We exhaust all our forces,
+which ought to face death boldly, in distracting our will from it. We
+deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one
+hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death,
+which should be the most perfect and the most luminous--being the most
+persistent and the most inevitable--remains the flimsiest of our ideas
+and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power
+which we never looked in the face? How could it profit by flashes
+kindled only to help us escape it? To fathom its abysses, we wait
+until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life
+arrive. We do not think of death until we have no longer the strength,
+I will not say, to think, but even to breathe. A man returning among
+us from another century would not recognize without difficulty, in the
+depths of a present-day soul, the image of his gods, of his duty, of
+his love or of his universe; but the figure of death, when everything
+has changed around it and when even that which composes it and
+upon which it rests has vanished, he would find almost untouched,
+rough-drawn as it was by our fathers, hundreds, nay, thousands of
+years ago. Our intelligence, grown so bold and active, has not worked
+upon this figure, has added no single touch to it. Though we may no
+longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of
+the most skeptical among us are still steeped in the appalling mystery
+of the Hebrew Sheol, the pagan Hades, or the Christian Hell. Though it
+may no longer be lighted by very definite flames, the gulf still opens
+at the end of life, and, if less known, is all the more formidable.
+And, therefore, when the impending hour strikes to which we dared not
+raise our eyes, everything fails us at the same time. Those two or
+three uncertain ideas whereon, without examining them, we had meant to
+lean, give way like rushes beneath the weight of the last moments. In
+vain we seek a refuge among reflections that rave or are strange to us
+and do not know the roads to our heart. No one awaits us on the last
+shore where all is unprepared, where naught remains afoot save terror.
+
+
+
+
+ III
+
+ WE MUST ENLIGHTEN AND ESTABLISH
+ OUR IDEA OF DEATH
+
+
+It were a salutary thing for each of us to work out his idea of death
+in the light of his days and the strength of his intelligence and to
+learn to stand by it. He would say to death:
+
+"I know not who you are, or I would be your master; but, in days when
+my eyes saw clearer than to-day, I learnt what you are not: that is
+enough to prevent you from becoming my master."
+
+He would thus carry, imprinted on his memory, a tried image
+against which the last agony would not prevail and in which the
+phantom-stricken eyes would take fresh comfort. Instead of the
+terrible prayer of the dying, which is the prayer of the depths, he
+would say his own prayer, that of the peaks of his life, where would
+be gathered, like angels of peace, the most limpid, the most pellucid
+thoughts of his life. Is not that the prayer of prayers? After all,
+what is a true and worthy prayer, if not the most ardent and
+disinterested effort to reach and grasp the unknown?
+
+
+
+
+ IV
+
+ WE MUST RID DEATH OF THAT
+ WHICH GOES BEFORE
+
+
+"The doctors and the priests," said Napoleon, "have long been making
+death grievous."
+
+Let us, then, learn to look upon it as it is in itself, free from the
+horrors of matter and stripped of the terrors of the imagination. Let
+us first get rid of all that goes before and does not belong to it.
+Thus, we impute to it the tortures of the last illness; and that is
+not right. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them.
+They form part of life and not of death. We easily forget the most
+cruel sufferings that restore us to health; and the first sun of
+convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of
+pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the
+evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a
+reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death
+alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of
+science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse
+death because it puts an end to them.
+
+
+
+
+ V
+
+ THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE
+ ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE
+
+
+In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life,
+the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of
+men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and
+especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see
+approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls
+us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home
+of the only invincible terrors which the human soul has ever felt.
+
+It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We
+shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain
+faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into
+which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
+struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is
+the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and
+horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility
+of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already
+greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the
+sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider
+it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most
+excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at
+a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at
+their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so
+great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room
+for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their
+revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as
+the highest law of human conscience.
+
+
+
+
+ VI
+
+ THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN
+ PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH
+
+
+One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down
+to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
+long since died out in the mind of men. That is why the doctors act
+as though they were convinced that there is no known torture but is
+preferable to those awaiting us in the unknown. They seem persuaded
+that every minute gained amidst the most intolerable sufferings is
+snatched from the incomparably more dreadful sufferings which the
+mysteries of the hereafter reserve for men; and, of two evils to
+avoid that which they know to be imaginary, they choose the real one.
+Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as good
+Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are only yielding
+to the unanimous error which daily strengthens the circle wherein it
+is confined: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of
+death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the
+agony.
+
+
+
+
+ VII
+
+ THEIR ARGUMENTS
+
+
+They, on their part, say or might say that, in the present stage of
+science, two or three cases excepted, there is never a certainty of
+death. Not to support life to its last limits, even at the cost of
+insupportable torments, were perhaps to kill. Doubtless there is not
+one chance in a hundred thousand that the sufferer escape. No matter.
+If that chance exist which, in the majority of cases, will give but a
+few days, or, at the utmost, a few months of a life that will not
+be the real life, but much rather, as the Latin said, "an extended
+death," those hundred thousand torments will not have been in vain.
+A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of
+tortures.
+
+Here are, face to face, two values that cannot be compared; and, if we
+mean to weigh them in the same balance, we must heap the scale which
+we see with all that remains to us, that is, with every imaginable
+pain, for at the decisive hour this is the only weight which counts
+and which is heavy enough to raise by a few degrees the other scale
+that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick
+darkness of another world.
+
+
+
+
+ VIII
+
+ THAT WHICH DOES NOT BELONG
+ TO DEATH
+
+
+Increased by so many adventitious horrors, the horror of death becomes
+such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors' reasons. And yet
+there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree.
+They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to
+deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them
+would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate
+and, like misers, measure out drop by drop the clemency and peace
+which they grudge and which they ought to lavish, dreading lest they
+should weaken the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless
+and painful quiverings of life that does not wish to give place to the
+coming quiet.
+
+It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater
+daring. It is enough to state once more that all this does not concern
+death. It happens before it and below it. It is not the arrival of
+death, but the departure of life that is appalling. It is not death,
+but life that we must act upon. It is not death that attacks life; it
+is life that wrongfully resists death. Evils hasten up from every
+side at the approach of death, but not at its call; and, though they
+gather round it, they did not come with it. Do you accuse sleep of
+the fatigue that oppresses you if you do not yield to it? All those
+strugglings, those waitings, those tossings, those tragic cursings are
+on this same side of the slope to which we cling and not on the other
+side. They are, for that matter, accidental and temporary and emanate
+only from our ignorance. All our knowledge only helps us to die in
+greater pain than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when
+science will turn against its error and no longer hesitate to shorten
+our misfortunes. A day will come when it will dare and act with
+certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour,
+knowing that it has reached its term, even as it withdraws silently
+every evening, knowing that its task is done. Once the doctor and
+the sick man have learnt what they have to learn, there will be no
+physical nor metaphysical reason why the advent of death should not be
+as salutary as that of sleep. Perhaps even, as there will be other
+things to consider, it will be possible to surround death with deeper
+delights and fairer dreams. Henceforth, in any case, once death is
+exonerated from all that goes before, it will be easier to face it
+without fear and to enlighten that which follows after.
+
+
+
+
+ IX
+
+ THE HORRORS OF THE GRAVE ALSO
+ DO NOT BELONG TO DEATH
+
+
+Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it.
+The first has neither face nor shape and overshadows the whole region
+of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as
+powerful and strikes all our senses. Let us first examine the latter.
+
+Even as we impute to death all the evils that precede it, so do we add
+to the dread which it inspires all that happens beyond it, thus doing
+it the same injustice at its going as at its coming. Is it death that
+digs our graves and orders us to keep there that which was made to
+disappear? If we cannot think without horror of the fate of the
+beloved in the grave, is it death or we that placed him there? Because
+death carries the spirit to some place unknown, shall we reproach it
+with our bestowal of the body which it leaves with us? Death descends
+upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by
+what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is
+gone. And it is already far away when we begin the frightful work
+which we try hard to prolong as much as we possibly can, as though we
+were persuaded that it is our only security against forgetfulness. I
+am well aware that, from any other than the human point of view, this
+proceeding is very innoxious. Looked upon from a sufficient height,
+decomposing flesh is no more repulsive than a fading flower or a
+crumbling stone. But, when all is said, it offends our senses, shocks
+our memory, daunts our courage, whereas it would be so easy for us to
+avoid the hateful test. Purified by fire, the memory lives in the
+heights as a beautiful idea; and death is naught but an immortal birth
+cradled in flames. This has been well understood by the wisest and
+happiest nations in history. What happens in our graves poisons our
+thoughts together with our bodies. The figure of death, in the
+imagination of men, depends before all upon the form of burial; and
+the funeral rites govern not only the fate of those who depart, but
+also the happiness of those who stay, for they raise in the very
+background of life the great image upon which their eyes linger in
+consolation or despair.
+
+
+
+
+ X
+
+ WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE UNKNOWN
+ INTO WHICH DEATH HURLS US,
+ LET US FIRST PUT RELIGIOUS
+ FEARS FROM OUR MINDS
+
+
+There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the
+unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us not delay in
+putting from our minds all that the positive religions have left
+there. Let us remember only that it is not for us to prove that they
+are not proved, but for them to establish that they are true. Now not
+one of them brings us a proof before which a candid intelligence can
+bow. Nor would it suffice if that intelligence were able to bow; for
+man lawfully to believe and thus to limit his endless seeking, the
+proof would need to be irresistible. The God offered to us by the best
+and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and
+fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things,
+that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should
+accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most
+ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty?
+He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even
+if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is
+buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less uncertain. If not by
+our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the
+accidents of race or birth, by some aesthetic or sentimental hazard? Or
+has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the
+understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If
+that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that
+does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He
+gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of
+the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns
+the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us,
+we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and
+incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an
+immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter
+loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of
+its Author.
+
+
+
+
+ XI
+
+ ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE
+
+
+Here we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
+which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was
+there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all
+that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific
+certainty to break through its darkness--for man has the right to hope
+for that which he does not yet conceive--the only point that interests
+us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual
+intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know
+whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.
+
+Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no
+more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day;
+survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with
+universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this
+world.
+
+Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity
+without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is
+dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out
+of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not
+a quiver of our nerves will go where they will cease to be, for there
+is no place where anything ceases to be. The brightness of a star
+extinguished millions of years ago still wanders in the ether where
+our eyes will perhaps behold it this very night, pursuing its endless
+road. It is the same with all that we see, as with all that we do not
+see. To be able to do away with a thing, that is to say, to fling it
+into nothingness, nothingness would have to exist; and, if it exist,
+under whatever form, it is no longer nothingness. As soon as we
+try to analyze it, to define it, or to understand it, thoughts and
+expressions fail us, or create that which they are struggling to deny.
+It is as contrary to the nature of our reason and probably of all
+imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to
+infinity. Nothingness, besides, is but a negative infinity, a sort of
+infinity of darkness opposed to that which our intelligence strives to
+enlighten, or rather it is but a child-name or nickname which our mind
+has bestowed upon that which it has not attempted to embrace, for we
+call nothingness all that which escapes our senses or our reason and
+exists without our knowledge. The more that human thought rises and
+increases, the less comprehensible does nothingness become. In any
+case--and this is what matters here--if nothingness were possible,
+since it could not be anything whatever, it could not be dreadful.
+
+
+
+
+ XII
+
+ THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+Next comes survival with our consciousness of to-day. I have broached
+this question in an essay on _Immortality_,[2] of which I will only
+reproduce an essential passage, contenting myself with supporting it
+with a few new considerations.
+
+[Footnote 2: This essay forms part of the volume published under the
+title of _The Measure of the Hours_.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]
+
+What composes this sense of the ego which turns each of us into
+the centre of the universe, the only point that matters in space
+and time? Is it formed of sensations of our body, or of thoughts
+independent of our body? Would our body be conscious of itself without
+our mind? And, on the other hand, what would our mind be without our
+body? We know bodies without mind, but no mind without a body. It is
+almost certain that an intellect devoid of senses, devoid of organs to
+create and nourish it, exists; but it is impossible to imagine that
+ours could thus exist and yet remain similar to that which derived
+from our sensibility all that gave it life.
+
+
+
+
+ XIII
+
+ IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE
+
+
+This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of
+its destruction, this ego is neither our mind nor our body, since
+we recognize that both are waves that flow away and are renewed
+incessantly. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or
+substance, for these are always in evolution, nor life, which is the
+cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for
+us to apprehend or define it, to tell where it dwells. When we try to
+go back to its last source, we find hardly more than a succession of
+memories, a series of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled,
+attached to the one instinct of living: a series of habits of our
+sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions against the
+surrounding phenomena. When all is said, the most steadfast point of
+that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand, to be a
+somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one
+of the frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear
+the most promptly at the least disturbance of our health. "As an
+English poet has very truly said, that which clamours aloud for
+eternity is the very part of me that will perish."
+
+It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious
+ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively,
+that every reality of our life disappears before this phantom. It is a
+matter of utter indifference to us that throughout eternity our body
+or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the
+most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume,
+beauty, light, air, star; it is likewise indifferent to us that our
+intellect should expand until it mixes with the life of the worlds,
+understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not
+affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves,
+unless that memory of a few almost always insignificant facts
+accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.
+
+"I care not," says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand
+nothing. "I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions
+of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses:
+they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network
+of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centre
+wherein lies the sensitive point which I feel to be all myself. They
+are now set loose, floating in space and time, and their fate is as
+unknown to me as that of the most distant constellations. Anything
+that occurs exists for me only upon condition that I be able to
+recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and
+precisely nowhere, which I turn like a mirror about this world whose
+phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it."
+
+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 words--which in
+reality are but images--by the aid of which it strives to tear itself
+from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How
+could that mind remain what it was when there is nothing left to it 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 grace of that body? A few memories of a
+life in common? 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?
+
+
+
+
+ XIV
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+"But," I shall be told, "there is more in us than the intellect
+discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not
+placed there; we contain a being superior to the one we know."
+
+That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by unconsciousness,
+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 superior being
+whom it has never known? What will it do in the presence of that
+stranger? If I be told that stranger is myself, I will readily agree;
+but was that which upon earth felt and measured my joys and sorrows
+and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me,
+was that this unmoved, unseen stranger who existed in me without my
+cognizance, even as I am probably about to live in him without his
+concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the pitiful
+recollection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my
+place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater 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 wings that which I feel myself
+to be to-day?
+
+
+
+
+ XV
+
+ IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD
+ NOT BE DREADFUL
+
+
+It seems, therefore, that a survival with our present consciousness is
+as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover,
+even if it were admissible, it would 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 soul 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 soul 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, treachery, personal humiliations, as well as the afflictions
+and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire the sting that hurts it
+only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own
+sorrow, which is the sorrow of not knowing, the soul, once delivered
+from its body, could suffer only at the recollection of that body. It
+is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it
+has left behind on earth. But, in the eyes of that which no longer
+counts the days, those troubles will seem so brief that it will not
+grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and whither they
+lead, it will not behold their severity.
+
+The soul 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 one is no longer bound by space and time, is already to
+transcend them.
+
+
+
+
+ XVI
+
+ THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT
+ CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+There remains but the survival without consciousness, or survival with
+a consciousness different from that of to-day.
+
+A survival without consciousness seems at first sight the most
+probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the
+other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful,
+therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most
+consistent with the present state of human thought, to set that limit
+to their anxiety there. They have nothing to dread; for every fear, if
+any remain, would, if we look into it carefully, deck itself with
+hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind,
+separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished,
+scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the
+great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without
+dreams and without awakening.
+
+But this is only a solution that flatters indolence. If we press those
+who speak of a survival without consciousness, we perceive that they
+mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and
+we have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of
+consciousness to persist in infinity.
+
+Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
+of the universe into which their own will fall. But that means solving
+very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
+night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
+man's brain.
+
+
+
+
+ XVII
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+This question is closely allied to our modified consciousness. There
+is for the moment no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in
+its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.
+
+Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
+one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as
+its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a
+form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look
+upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind
+will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad
+expectation that greets a birth. If, before being born, we were
+permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and
+a life that should not be completed by the magnificent hour of
+death, which of us, knowing what we ought to know, would accept
+the disquieting problem of an existence that would not end in the
+reassuring mystery of its conclusion? Which of us would care to come
+into a world where there is so little to learn, if he did not know
+that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best
+part of life is that it prepares this hour for us, that it is the one
+and only road leading to the magic gateway and into that incomparable
+mystery where misfortunes and sufferings will no longer be possible,
+because we shall have lost the body that produced them; where the
+worst that can befall us is the dreamless sleep which we count among
+the number of the greatest boons on earth; where, lastly, it is almost
+unimaginable that a thought can survive to mingle with the substance
+of the universe, that is to say, with infinity, which, if it be not a
+waste of indifference, can be nothing but a sea of joy.
+
+
+
+
+ XVIII
+
+ THE LIMITED EGO WOULD BECOME
+ A TORTURE
+
+
+Before fathoming that sea, let us remark to those who aspire to
+maintain their ego that they are calling down the sufferings which
+they dread. The ego implies limits. The ego cannot subsist except in
+so far as it is separated from that which surrounds it. The stronger
+the ego, the narrower its limits and the clearer the separation. The
+more painful too; for the mind, if it remain as we know it--and we are
+not able to imagine it different--will no sooner have seen its limits
+than it will wish to overstep them: and, the more separated it feels,
+the greater will be its longing to unite with that which lies outside.
+There will therefore be an eternal struggle between its being and its
+aspirations. And really there were no object in being born and dying
+only for the purpose of these endless contests. Have we not here yet
+one more proof that our ego, as we conceive it, could never subsist in
+the infinity where it must needs go, since it cannot go elsewhere? It
+behooves us therefore to get rid of imaginations that emanate only
+from our body, even as the mists that veil the daylight from our sight
+emanate only from low places. Pascal has said, once and for all: "The
+narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from our view."
+
+
+
+
+ XIX
+
+ A NEW EGO CAN FIND A NUCLEUS AND
+ DEVELOP ITSELF IN INFINITY
+
+
+On the other hand--for we must be honest, probe the conflicting
+darkness which we believe nearest to the truth and show no bias--on
+the other hand, we can grant to those who are wedded to the thought
+of remaining as they are that the survival of a mere particle of
+themselves would suffice to renew them again in the heart of an
+infinity wherefrom their body no longer separates them. If it seems
+impossible that anything--a movement, a vibration, a radiation--should
+stop or disappear, why then should thought be lost? There will, no
+doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to allure the new
+ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it will find in
+that new and endless environment, just as the other ego, on this
+earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we
+have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it be
+impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to
+us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day;
+it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much
+more chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more foreign
+substance than any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a
+long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not
+become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its nucleus, of
+which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less
+concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on
+leaving our mother's womb transforms us to such a point that there is,
+so to speak, no connexion between the embryo that we were and the man
+that we have become, is it not right to think that the much newer,
+more unknown, wider and more fertile environment which we enter on
+quitting life will transform us even more? One can see in what happens
+to us here a figure of that which awaits us elsewhere and readily
+admit that our spiritual being, liberated from its body, if it does
+not mingle at the first onset with the infinite, will develop itself
+there gradually, will choose itself a substance and, no longer
+trammelled by space and time, will grow without end. It is very
+possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law of our
+future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts will
+welcome us on the other bank and that the quality of our intellect
+will determine that of the infinite that crystallizes around it. Every
+hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be addressed
+to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us. It
+finds no place in the human imagination that explores the future
+methodically. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
+over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
+worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
+will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
+be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
+this world the only narrow, grudging, obscure and sorrowful moment of
+our destiny.
+
+
+
+
+ XX
+
+ THE ONLY SORROW THAT CAN TOUCH
+ OUR MIND
+
+
+We have said that the one sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of
+not knowing or not understanding, which contains the sorrow of
+powerlessness; for he who knows the supreme causes, being no longer
+paralyzed by matter, becomes one with them and acts with them; and he
+who understands ends by approving, or else the universe would be a
+mistake, which is not possible. I do not believe that another sorrow
+of the sheer mind can be imagined. The only one which, before
+reflection, might seem admissible and which, in any case, could be
+but ephemeral would arise from the sight of the pain and misery that
+remain on the earth which we have left. But this sorrow, after all,
+would be but one side and an insignificant phase of the sorrow of
+powerlessness and of not understanding. As for the latter, though it
+is not only beyond the domain of our intelligence, but even at an
+insuperable distance from our imagination, we may say that it would be
+intolerable only if it were without hope. But, in order to be without
+hope, the universe would have to abandon any attempt to understand
+itself, or admit within itself an object that remained for ever
+foreign to it. Either the mind will not perceive its limits and,
+consequently, will not suffer from them, or else it will overstep them
+as it perceives them; for how could the universe have parts eternally
+condemned to form no part of itself and of its knowledge? Hence we
+cannot understand that the torture of not understanding, supposing it
+to exist for a moment, should not end by mingling with the state of
+infinity, which, if it be not happiness as we comprehend it, could be
+naught but an indifference higher and purer than joy.
+
+
+
+
+ XXI
+
+ INFINITY AS CONCEIVED BY OUR
+ REASON
+
+
+Let us turn our thoughts towards it. The problem extends beyond
+humanity and embraces all things. It is possible, I think, to view
+infinity under two distinct aspects and try to foresee our fate
+therein. Let us contemplate the first of these aspects. We are plunged
+into a universe that has no limits in space or time. It never began,
+nor will it ever end. It could not have an aim, for, if it had one,
+it would have attained it in the infinity of years that preceded
+us. It is not making for anywhere, for it would have arrived there;
+consequently, all that the worlds within its pale, all that we
+ourselves do can have no influence upon it. If it have no thought,
+it will never have one. If it have one, that thought has been at its
+climax since all time and will remain there, changeless and immovable.
+It is as young as it has ever been and as old as it will ever be. It
+has made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it
+will make in the future; and, as all the possible combinations have
+been exhausted since all time, it does not seem as if that which has
+not taken place in the eternity that extends before our birth can
+happen in that which will follow after our death. If it have not
+become conscious, it will never become so; if it know not what it
+wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or
+knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning.
+
+
+
+
+ XXII
+
+ INFINITY AS PERCEIVED BY OUR
+ SENSES
+
+
+All this would be, if not intelligible, at least acceptable to our
+reason; but in that universe float thousands of millions of worlds
+limited by space and time. They are born, they die and they are born
+again. They form part of the whole; and we see, therefore, that parts
+of that which has neither beginning nor end themselves begin and end.
+We, in fact, know only those parts; and they are of a number so
+infinite that in our eyes they fill all infinity. That which is going
+nowhere teems with that which appears to be going somewhere. That
+which has always known what it wants, or will never learn, seems
+eternally to be making more or less unfortunate experiments. What
+is that which has already attained perfection trying to achieve?
+Everything that we discover in that which could not possibly have an
+aim looks as though it were pursuing one with inconceivable ardour;
+and the spirit that animates what we see in that which should know
+everything and possess itself seems to know nothing and to seek itself
+without intermission. Thus all that is apparent to our senses in
+infinity gainsays that which our reason is compelled to ascribe to
+it. According as we fathom it, we understand better the depth of our
+want of understanding; and, the more we strive to penetrate the two
+incomprehensibilities that stand face to face, the more they
+contradict each other.
+
+
+
+
+ XXIII
+
+ WHICH OF THE TWO SHALL WE
+ KNOW?
+
+
+What will become of us amid all this obscurity? Shall we leave the
+finite wherein we dwell to be swallowed up in this or the other
+infinite? In other words, shall we end by mingling with the infinite
+which our reason conceives, or shall we remain eternally in that which
+our eyes behold, that is to say, in numberless changing and ephemeral
+worlds? Shall we never leave those worlds which seem doomed to die and
+to be reborn eternally, to enter at last into that which, since all
+eternity, can neither have been born nor have died and which exists
+without either future or past? Shall we one day escape, with all that
+surrounds us, from the unhappy experiments, to find our way at last
+into peace, wisdom, the changeless and boundless consciousness, or
+into the hopeless unconsciousness? Shall we have the fate which our
+senses foretell, or that which our intelligence demands? Or are both
+senses and intelligence illusions, puny implements, vain weapons of
+a brief hour that were never intended to probe or contend with the
+universe? If there really be a contradiction, is it wise to accept it
+and to deem impossible that which we do not understand, seeing that we
+understand almost nothing? Is truth not at an immeasurable distance
+from those inconsistencies which appear to us enormous and irreducible
+and which, doubtless, are of no more importance than the rain that
+falls upon the sea?
+
+
+
+
+ XXIV
+
+ THE INFINITY WHICH BOTH OUR REASON
+ AND OUR SENSES CAN ADMIT
+
+
+But, even to our poor understanding of to-day, the discrepancy between
+the infinity conceived by our reason and that perceived by our senses
+is perhaps more apparent than real. When we say that, in a universe
+that has existed since all eternity, every experiment, every possible
+combination has been made; when we declare that there is not a chance
+that that which has not taken place in the uncountable past can take
+place in the uncountable future, our imagination attributes to the
+infinity of time a preponderance which it cannot possess. In truth,
+all that infinity contains must be as infinite as the time at its
+disposal; and the chances, encounters and combinations that lie
+therein have not been exhausted in the eternity that goes before us
+any more than they could be in the eternity that comes after us. There
+is, therefore, no climax, no changelessness, no immovability. It is
+probable that the universe is seeking and finding itself every day,
+that it has not become entirely conscious and does not yet know what
+it wants. It is almost certain that its ideal is still veiled by the
+shadow of its immensity and almost evident that the experiments and
+chances are following one upon the other in unimaginable worlds,
+compared wherewith all those which we see on starry nights are no more
+than a pinch of gold-dust in the ocean depths. Lastly, it is very
+nearly sure that we ourselves, or whatever remains of us--it matters
+not--will profit one day by those experiments and those chances. That
+which has not yet happened may suddenly supervene; and the best state,
+as well as the supreme wisdom which will recognize and establish it,
+is perhaps ready to arise from the clash of circumstance. It were not
+at all astonishing if the consciousness of the universe, in the
+endeavour to form itself, had not yet met with the aid of the
+necessary chances and if human thought were seconding one of those
+decisive chances. Here there is a hope. Small as man and his thought
+may appear, he has exactly the value of the most enormous forces that
+he is able to conceive, since there is neither great nor small in the
+immeasurable; and, if our body equalled the dimensions of all the
+worlds which our eyes can see, it would have exactly the same weight
+and the same importance with regard to the universe that it has
+to-day. The mind alone perhaps occupies in infinity a space which
+comparisons do not reduce to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+ XXV
+
+ OUR FATE IN INFINITY
+
+
+Whatever the ultimate truth may be, whether we admit the abstract,
+absolute and perfect infinity--the changeless, immovable infinity
+which has attained perfection and which knows everything, to which our
+reason tends--or whether we prefer that offered to us by the evidence,
+here below undeniable, of our senses--the infinity which seeks itself,
+which is still evolving and not yet established--it behoves us above
+all to foresee in it our fate, which, in any case, must end by
+absorption in that very infinity.
+
+The first infinity, the ideal infinity, is so strangely contrary to
+all that we see that it is best not to attack it until we have tried
+to explore the second. Moreover, it is quite possible that it may
+succeed the other. As we have said, that which has not taken place in
+the eternity before may happen in the eternity after us; and nothing
+save innumerous accidents is opposed to the prospect that the universe
+may at last acquire the integral consciousness that will establish it
+at its climax. After giving a glance, useless, for that matter, and
+impotent, at all that may perhaps arise, we shall try to interrogate,
+without hope of answer, the mystery of the boundless peace into which
+it is possible that we may sink with the other worlds.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVI
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+Behold us, then, in the infinity of those worlds, the stellar
+infinity, the infinity of the heavens, which assuredly veils other
+things from our eyes, but could never be a total illusion. It seems to
+us to be peopled only with objects--planets, suns, stars, nebulae,
+atoms, imponderous fluids--which move, unite and separate, repel and
+attract one another, which shrink and expand, displace one another
+incessantly and never arrive, which measure space in that which has
+no limit and number the hours in that which has no term. In a word,
+we are in an infinity that seems to have almost the same character,
+the same habits as that power in the midst of which we breathe and
+which, upon our earth, we call nature or life.
+
+What will be our fate in that infinity? It is not vain to ask one's
+self the question, even if we should mingle with it after losing all
+consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if our existence should be
+no more than a little substance without name, soul or matter--one
+cannot tell--suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces
+time and space. It is not vain to ask one's self the question, for we
+are concerned with the history of the worlds or of the universe; and
+this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own
+great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something
+incomparably better and vaster will end by finding us again some day.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVII
+
+ SHALL WE BE UNHAPPY THERE?
+
+
+Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider
+the habits of our nature and remember that we form part of a universe
+that has not yet collected its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that
+good and bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and
+that, when we have lost the agent of our sufferings, we shall not meet
+any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here;
+and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting
+derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in the unknowable that
+seeks itself hopelessly; will not our mind know here the frightful
+torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the
+last which the imagination can touch with its wing? Lastly, if there
+were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would still remain
+the matter and the spirit (or, at least, the obviously single force to
+which we give that double name) which composed them and whose fate
+must be no more indifferent to us than our own fate; for, let us
+repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of the universe becomes
+our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to ourselves:
+
+"What can it matter? We shall not be there."
+
+We shall be there always, because everything will be there.
+
+
+
+
+ XXVIII
+
+ QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS
+
+
+Will all this to which we shall belong, in a world ever seeking
+itself, continue a prey to new, unceasing and perhaps painful
+experiments? Since the part that we were was unhappy, why should the
+part that we shall be enjoy a better fortune? Who can assure us that
+those unending combinations and endeavours will not be more sorrowful,
+more awkward and more baneful than those which we are leaving; and how
+shall we explain that these have come about after so many millions of
+others which should have opened the eyes of the genius of infinity? It
+is idle to persuade ourselves, as Hindu wisdom would, that our sorrows
+are but illusions and appearances: it is none the less true that they
+make us very really unhappy. Has the universe elsewhere a more
+complete consciousness, a more just and serene principle of thought
+than on this earth and in the worlds which we perceive? And, if it be
+true that it has somewhere attained that better thought, why does the
+thought that presides over the destinies of our earth not profit by
+it? Could no communication be possible between worlds which must have
+been born of the same idea and are steeped in it? What would be the
+mystery of that isolation? Are we to believe that the earth marks the
+most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can
+the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must
+it have struggled, to have come no farther than this? But, on the
+other hand, can it have been stayed by that darkness or by those
+obstacles which, being unable to arise from any elsewhere, can but
+have sprung from itself? Who then could have set those insoluble
+problems to infinity and from what more remote and profound region
+than itself would they have issued? Some one, after all, must know
+what they ask; and, as behind infinity there can be none that is not
+infinity itself, it is impossible to imagine a malignant will in a
+will that leaves no point around it but what it fills entirely. Or are
+the experiments begun in the stars continued mechanically, by virtue
+of the force acquired, without regard to their uselessness and to
+their pitiful consequences, according to the custom of nature, which
+knows nothing of our parsimony and squanders the suns in space as it
+does the seed on earth, knowing that nothing can be lost? Or, again,
+is the whole question of our peace and happiness, like that of the
+fate of the worlds, reduced to knowing whether or not the infinity of
+endeavours and combinations be equal to that of eternity? Or, lastly,
+to come to the greatest probability, is it we who deceive ourselves,
+who know nothing, who see nothing and who consider imperfect that
+which is perhaps faultless, we, who are but an infinitesimal fragment
+of the intelligence which we judge with the aid of the little shreds
+of thought which it has vouchsafed to lend us?
+
+
+
+
+ XXIX
+
+ THE SAME, CONTINUED
+
+
+How could we reply, how could our thoughts and glances penetrate the
+infinite and the invisible, we who neither understand nor even see the
+thing by which we see and which is the source of all our thoughts? In
+fact, as has been very justly observed, man does not see light itself.
+He sees only matter, or rather the small part of the great worlds
+which he knows by the name of matter, touched by light. He does not
+perceive the immense rays that cross the heavens save at the moment
+when they are stopped by an object of the nature of those which his
+eye is accustomed to see upon this earth: were it otherwise, the whole
+space filled with innumerable suns and boundless forces, instead of
+being an abyss of absolute darkness which absorbs and extinguishes the
+clusters of beams that shoot across it from every side, would be but a
+prodigious, untenable ocean of flashes. Shakespeare's famous lines:
+
+     "There are more things in heaven and earth,
+           Horatio,
+     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
+
+have long since become utterly inadequate. There are no longer
+more things than our philosophy can dream of or imagine: there is
+none but things which it cannot dream of, there is nothing but the
+unimaginable; and, if we do not even see the light, which is the only
+thing that we believed we saw, it may be said that there is nothing
+all around us but the invisible.
+
+We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly
+indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is
+well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching,
+seeing or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it
+is, just as they would prevent us from understanding it, if an
+intelligence of a different order were to bethink itself of revealing
+or explaining it to us. It is impossible for us, therefore, to
+appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable
+respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we
+are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense
+circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing
+towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards
+that which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny
+confines is to struggle towards that which appears to us the best and
+to remain heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those
+confines can ever be wholly lost.
+
+
+
+
+ XXX
+
+ IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO ANSWER
+ THEM
+
+
+But let not all these insoluble questions drive us towards fear. From
+the point of view of our future beyond the grave, it is in no way
+necessary that we should have an answer to everything. Whether the
+universe have already found its consciousness, whether it find it one
+day or see it everlastingly, it could not exist for the purpose of
+being unhappy and of suffering, neither in its entirety, nor in any
+one of its parts; and it matters little if the latter be invisible or
+incommensurable, considering that the smallest is as great as the
+greatest in what has neither limit nor measure. To torture a point
+is the same thing as to torture the worlds; and, if it torture the
+worlds, it is its own substance that it tortures. Its very destiny, in
+which we are placed, protects us. Our sufferings there could be but
+ephemeral; and nothing matters that is not eternal. It is possible,
+although somewhat incomprehensible, that parts should err and go
+astray; but it is impossible that sorrow should be one of its lasting
+and necessary laws; for it would have brought that law to bear against
+itself. In like manner, the universe is and must be its own law and
+its sole master; if not, the law or the master whom it must obey
+would then be the universe; and the centre of a word which we
+pronounce without being able to grasp its scope would be simply
+displaced. If it be unhappy, that means that it wills its own
+unhappiness; if it will its unhappiness, it is mad; and, if it appear
+to us mad, that means that our reason works contrary to everything and
+to the only laws possible, seeing that they are eternal, or, to speak
+more humbly, that it judges what it wholly fails to understand.
+
+
+
+
+ XXXI
+
+ EVERYTHING MUST FINISH EXEMPT
+ FROM SUFFERING
+
+
+Everything, therefore, must finish, or perhaps everything already is,
+if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all
+suffering, all anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all,
+is our happiness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow,
+anxiety and unhappiness?
+
+But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where
+infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and
+unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it
+does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond
+its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our
+nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which
+could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken
+pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing
+hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we
+shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with
+their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that
+the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze,
+or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer
+from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant,
+seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the
+torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each
+many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulae whose nature and
+dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we
+attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance
+working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be
+impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too
+cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but
+a trifle, a few papillae more or less to our skin, the slightest
+modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the
+silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an
+unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to
+persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold
+are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals
+of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two
+enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each
+world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with
+another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent
+experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unexpected
+happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though
+they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one
+another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard
+that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is
+but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with
+wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable
+event....
+
+And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain
+motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity,
+nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so
+great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever
+prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing
+can impoverish.
+
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+
+
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