Our Eternity

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Hope. After the painting by G. F. WATTS.

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OUR ETERNITY

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

TRANSLATED BY

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

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CHAPTER I

OUR INJUSTICE TO DEATH

It has been well said:

“Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, where we shall not be. 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]

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Footnote 1:

Marie Lenéru, Les Affranchis, Act III., Sc. iv.

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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 but thrives on our fears. He who seeks to forget it has his memory filled with it; he who tries to shun it meets naught else. It clouds everything with its shadow. 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. All the forces which might avail to face death we exhaust in averting our will from it. We deliver death into the groping 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 of ideas—being the most persistent and the most inevitable—remains the flimsiest and the only one that is a laggard? How should we know the one power which we never look in the face? How could it have profited by gleams 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 have difficulty in recognizing, 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 depends 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 not, so to speak, retouched it in any way. Though we may no longer believe in the tortures of the damned, all the vital cells of the most sceptical 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 minutes. In vain we seek a refuge among reflexions that are illusive 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.

Bossuet, the great poet of the tomb, says:

“It is not worthy of a Christian”—and I would add, of a man—“to postpone his struggle with death until the moment when it arrives to carry him off.”

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 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 were not: that is enough to prevent you from becoming mine.”

He would thus bear, graven on his memory, a tried image against which the last agony would not prevail and from which the phantom-stricken eyes would draw 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 existence, where would be gathered, like angels of peace, the most lucid, the most rarefied 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?

“The doctors and the priests,” said Napoleon, “have long been making death grievous.”

And Bacon wrote:

“Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa.”

Let us, then, learn to look upon death 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 just. Illnesses have nothing in common with that which ends them. They form part of life and not of death. We readily 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 a term to them.

In point of fact, whereas 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 last, terrible second of rupture which we shall perhaps see approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls us, naked, disarmed, abandoned by all and stripped of everything, into an unknown that is the home of the only invincible terrors which the soul of man has ever felt.

It is doubly unjust to impute the torments of that second 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 watchers, at least; for very often the consciousness of him whom death, in Bossuet’s phrase, has “brought to bay” is already greatly dulled and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which it seems to be enduring. All doctors consider it their first duty to prolong to the uttermost even the cruellest pangs of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at the bedside of a dying man, 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 recoil before a law which all recognize and revere as the highest law of man’s conscience.

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarous. Its roots go down to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have long since died out in the intelligence 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 amid 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 only real one. Besides, in thus postponing the end of a torture, which, as old Seneca says, is the best part of that torture, they are but yielding to the unanimous error which makes its enclosing circle more iron-bound every day: the prolongation of the agony increasing the horror of death; and the horror of death demanding the prolongation of the agony.

The doctors, on their side, 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, might be murder. Doubtless there is not one chance in a hundred thousand that the patient 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 Romans called it, “an extended death,” those hundred thousand useless 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 to say, 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 hair’s-breadth the other scale that dips into what we do not see and is loaded with the thick darkness of another world.

Swollen 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 dull 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 miserly drops of the clemency and peace which they ought to lavish and which they grudge in their dread of weakening the last resistance, that is to say, the most useless and painful quiverings of reluctant life refusing to give place to oncoming rest.

It is not for me to decide whether their pity might show greater daring. It is enough to state once more that all this has no concern with death. It happens before it and beneath 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 the 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 merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. 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 nothing else to take into consideration, it will be possible to surround death with profounder ecstasies and fairer dreams. In any case and from this day, with death once acquitted of that which goes before, it will be easier to look upon it without fear and to lighten that which comes after.

Death, as we usually picture it, has two terrors looming behind it. The first has neither face nor form and permeates the whole region of our mind; the other is more definite, more explicit, but almost as powerful. The latter strikes all our senses. Let us examine it first.

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 is made to disappear? If we cannot think without horror of what befalls 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 into our midst to change the place of 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. For it is already far away when we begin the frightful work which we try hard to prolong to the very utmost, 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 innocent; and that, 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 foul ordeal. Purified by fire, the remembrance lives enthroned 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 ultimate background of life the great image upon which men’s eyes linger in consolation or despair.

There is, therefore, but one terror particular to death: that of the unknown into which it hurls us. In facing it, let us lose no time 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 an honest 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 of them 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 whose doubtfulness, from the human point of view, is not denied by its wisest and most ardent defenders? He only offers us a very uncertain story, which, even if scientifically substantiated, would be merely a beautiful lesson in morality and which is buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less doubtful. Must we here call to mind that Pascal, to defend that creed which was already tottering at a time when it seemed at its zenith, vainly attempted a demonstration the mere aspect of which would be enough to destroy the last remnant of faith in a wavering mind? Better than any other, he knew the stock proofs of the theologians, for they had been the sole study of the last years of his life. If but one of these proofs could have resisted examination, his genius, one of the three or four most profound and lucid geniuses ever known to humanity, must have given it an irresistible force. But he does not linger over these arguments, whose weakness he feels too well; he pushes them scornfully aside, he glories and, in a manner, rejoices in their futility:

“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”

His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:

“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery itself is incomprehensible to man.”

He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another, small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries which he cultivates or on which he dwells.

To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him; and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist. We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He does not exist.

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”

God is or is not.

“But to which side shall we lean? Reason can determine nothing about it. There is an infinite gulf that separates us. A game is played at the uttermost part of this infinite distance, in which heads may turn up or tails. Which will you wager? There is no reason for betting on either one or the other; you cannot reasonably defend either.”

The correct course would be not to wager at all.

“Yes, but you must wager: this is not a matter for your will; you are launched in it.”

Not to wager that God exists means wagering that He does not exist, for which He will punish you eternally. What then do you risk by wagering, at all hazards, that He exists? If He does not, you lose a few small pleasures, a few wretched comforts of this life, because your little sacrifice will not have been rewarded; if He exists, you gain an eternity of unspeakable happiness.

“‘It is true, but, in spite of all, I am so made that I cannot believe.’

“Never mind, follow the way in which they began who believe and who at first did not believe either, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That in itself will make you believe and will reduce you to the level of the beasts.”

“'But that is just what I am afraid of.’

“Why? What have you to lose?”

Nearly three centuries of apologetics have not added one useful argument to that terrible and despairing page of Pascal. And this is all that human intelligence has found to compel our life. If the God who demands our faith will not have us decide by our reason, by what then must our choice be made? By usage? By the accidents of race or birth, by some æsthetic or sentimental pitch-and-toss? 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 this 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 is rejected by that best and most divine part which He has implanted 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 that injustice may load us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of its Author.

CHAPTER II

ANNIHILATION

And now 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 is the vaster by 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 in the universal consciousness, or with a 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 exists, 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 illumine, 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 escapes our senses or our reason and exists without our knowledge.

But, it will perhaps be said, though the annihilation of every world and every thing be impossible, it is not so certain that their death is impossible; and, to us, what is the difference between nothingness and everlasting death? Here again we are led astray by our imagination and by words. We can no more conceive death than we can conceive nothingness. We use the word death to cover those fragments of nothingness which we believe that we understand; but, on closer examination, we are bound to recognize that our idea of death is much too puerile for it to contain the least truth. It reaches no higher than our own bodies and cannot measure the destinies of the universe. We give the name of death to anything that has a life a little different from ours. Even so do we act towards a world that appears to us motionless and frozen, the moon, for instance, because we are persuaded that any form of existence, animal or vegetable, is extinguished upon it for ever. But it is now some years since we learnt that the most inert matter, to outward seeming, is animated by movements so powerful and furious that all animal or vegetable life is no more than sleep and immobility by the side of the swirling eddies and immeasurable energy locked up in a wayside stone.

“There is no room for death!” cried Emily Brontë.

But, even if, in the infinite series of the centuries, all matter should really become inert and motionless, it would none the less persist under one form or another; and persistence, though it were in total immobility, would, after all, be but a form of life stable and silent at last. All that dies falls into life; and all that is born is of the same age as that which dies. If death carried us to nothingness, did birth then draw us out of that same nothingness? Why should the second be more impossible than the first? The higher human thought rises and the wider it expands, the less comprehensible do nothingness and death 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.

CHAPTER III

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 a few essential passages, restricting myself to supporting them with new considerations.

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 intelligence 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 has derived all that inspires it from our sensibility.

This ego, as we conceive it when we reflect upon the consequences of its destruction, this ego, therefore, is neither our mind nor our body, since we recognize that both are waves that roll by and are incessantly renewed. Is it an immovable point, which could not be form or substance, for these are always in evolution, nor yet life, which is the cause or effect of form and substance? In truth, it is impossible for us either to apprehend or define it, or even to say where it dwells. When we try to go back to its last source, we find little more than a succession of memories, a mass of ideas, confused, for that matter, and unsettled, all connected with the same instinct, the instinct of living: a mass 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 cries aloud for eternity is the very part of me that will perish.”

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Footnote 2:

This essay forms part of the volume published under the title of Life and Flowers.—Translator’s Note.

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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 disappears before this phantom. It is utterly indifferent 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—and it is certain that it does so become and that we must look for our dead not in our graveyards, but in space and light and life—it is likewise indifferent to us that our intelligence should expand until it takes part in the life of the worlds, until it 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 centres wherein lies the point which I feel to be my very self. They are thus set loose, floating in space and time; and their fate is as alien to me as that of the most distant stars. All that befalls has no existence for me unless I can recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and precisely nowhere and which I turn like a mirror about this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it.”

Thus our longing for immortality destroys itself while expressing itself, since it is on one of the accessory and most transient parts of our whole life that we base all the interest of our after-life. It seems to us that, if our existence be not continued with the greater part of its drawbacks, of the pettiness and blemishes that characterize it, nothing will distinguish it from that of other beings; that it will become a drop of ignorance in the ocean of the unknown; and that, thenceforth, all that may come to pass will no longer concern us.

What immortality can one promise to men who almost necessarily conceive it in this guise? What is the use of it? asks a puerile but profound instinct. Any immortality that does not drag with it through eternity, like the fetters of the convict that we were, the strange consciousness formed during a few years of movement, any immortality that does not bear that indelible mark of our identity is for us as though it were not. Most of the religions have been well aware of this and have reckoned with that instinct which desires and at the same time destroys the after-life. It is thus that the Catholic Church, going back to the most primitive hopes, promises us not only the integral preservation of our earthly ego, but even the resurrection of our own flesh.

There lies the crux of the riddle. When we demand that this small consciousness, that this sense of a special ego—almost childish and, in any case, extraordinarily limited; probably an infirmity of our actual intelligence—should accompany us into the infinity of time in order that we may understand and enjoy it, are we not wishing to perceive an object with the aid of an organ which is not intended for that purpose? Are we not asking that our hand should discover the light or that our eye should appreciate perfumes? Are we not, rather, acting like a sick man who, in order to recognize himself, to be quite sure that he is himself, should think it necessary to continue his sickness in health and in the unending sequence of his days? The comparison, indeed, is more accurate than is the habit of comparisons. Picture a blind man who is also paralyzed and deaf. He has been in this condition from his birth and has just attained his thirtieth year. What can the hours have embroidered on the imageless web of this poor life? The unhappy man must have gathered at the back of his memory, for lack of other recollections, a few halting sensations of heat and cold, of weariness and rest, of more or less active physical sufferings, of hunger and thirst. It is probable that all human joys, all our hopes and ideals, all our dreams of paradise will be reduced for him to the vague sense of well-being that follows the alleviation of a pain. There you have the only possible equipment of that consciousness and that ego. The intellect, having never been invoked from without, will sleep soundly, all-ignorant of itself. Nevertheless, the poor wretch will have his little life, to which he will cling as closely and eagerly as though he were the happiest of men. He will dread death; and the idea of entering into eternity without carrying with him the emotions and the memories of his dark and silent sick-bed will plunge him into the same despair into which we are plunged by the thought of abandoning a glorious life of light and love for the icy darkness of the tomb.

Let us now suppose that a miracle suddenly quicken his eyes and ears and reveal to him, through the open window by his bedside, the dawn rising over the plain, the song of the birds in the trees, the murmur of the wind among the leaves and of the water lapping its banks, the echoing of human voices among the morning hills. Let us suppose also that the same miracle, completing its work, restore the use of his limbs. He rises, stretches his arms to that prodigy which as yet for him possesses neither reality nor name: the light! He opens the door, staggers out amidst the effulgence; and his whole body is merged in the wonder of it all. He enters into an ineffable life, into a sky whereof no dream could have given him a foretaste; and, by a freak which is readily admissible in this sort of cure, health, introducing him to this inconceivable and unintelligible existence, wipes out in him all memory of days past.

What will be the state of this ego, of this central focus, the receptacle of all our sensations, the spot in which converges all that belongs in its own right to our life, the supreme point, the “egotic” point of our being, if I may venture to coin a word? Memory being abolished, will that ego recover within itself a few traces of the man that was? A new force, the intellect, awaking and suddenly displaying unprecedented activity, what relation will that intellect keep up with the inert, dull germ whence it has sprung? Where, in his past, shall the man fix his moorings so that his identity may endure? And yet will there not survive within him some sense or instinct, independent of his memory, his intellect and I know not what other faculties, that will make him recognize that it is indeed in him that the liberating miracle has been wrought, that it is indeed his life and not his neighbour’s, transformed, irrecognizable, but substantially the same, that has issued from the silence and the darkness to prolong itself in harmony and light? Can we picture the disorder, the wandering hither and thither of that bewildered consciousness? Have we any idea in what manner the ego of yesterday will unite with the ego of to-day and how the “egotic” point, the only point which we are anxious to preserve intact, will behave in that delirium and that upheaval?

Let us first endeavour to reply with sufficient precision to this question which comes within the province of our actual and visible life; for, if we are unable to do this, how can we hope to solve the other problem that stares every man in the face at the hour of death?

This sensitive point, in which the whole problem is summed up—for it is the only one in question; and, except in so far as it is concerned, immortality is certain—this mysterious point, to which, in the presence of death, we attach so high a value, we lose, strange to say, at any moment in life without feeling the least anxiety. Not only is it destroyed nightly in our sleep, but even in waking it is at the mercy of a host of accidents. A wound, a shock, an illness, a little alcohol, a little opium, a little smoke are enough to affect it. Even when nothing impairs it, it is not uniformly perceptible. An effort is often necessary, a deliberate looking into ourselves, before we can recover it and become aware of some particular event. At the least distraction, a joy passes by us without touching us, without giving up the pleasure which it contains. One would say that the functions of that organ by which we taste and know life are intermittent and that the presence of our ego, except in pain, is but a rapid and perpetual sequence of departures and returns. What reassures us is that we think ourselves certain to find it intact on awaking, after the wound, the shock or the distraction, whereas we are persuaded, so fragile do we feel it to be, that it is bound to disappear for ever in the awful impact between life and death.

One foremost truth, pending others which the future will no doubt reveal, is that, in these questions of life and death, our imagination has remained very childish. Almost every elsewhere, it is ahead of reason; but here it still loiters over the games of infancy. It surrounds itself with the barbaric dreams and longings wherewith it cradled the hopes and fears of cave-dwelling man. It asks for things that are impossible because they are too small. It clamours for privileges which, if obtained, were more to be dreaded than the most enormous disasters with which nihility threatens us. Can we think without shuddering of an eternity contained wholly within our paltry present-day consciousness? And behold how, in all this, we obey the illogical whims of fancy, which men in the olden time called la folle du logis. Which of us, if he were to go to sleep to-night in the scientific certainty of awaking in a hundred years exactly as he is to-day, with his body intact, even on condition that he lost all memory of his previous life—would such memories not be useless?—which of us would not welcome that age-long sleep with the same confidence as the brief, gentle slumbers of his every night? And yet between real death and this sleep there would be only the difference of that awakening deferred for a century, an awakening as alien to the sleeper as the birth of a posthumous child would be.

Or else, to say very much what Schopenhauer said to one who was unwilling to admit an immortality into which he would not carry his consciousness:

“Suppose that, to snatch you from some intolerable suffering, you were promised an awakening and a return to consciousness after a wholly unconscious sleep of three months?”

“‘I would accept it gladly.’

“But suppose that, at the end of the three months, they forgot you and did not wake you until ten thousand years had passed, how much the wiser would you be? And, sleep once begun, what difference does it make to you whether it last for three months or for ever?”

Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is supplied by our senses; and even the images and the words—which in reality are but images—by the aid of which it strives to sever itself from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could that mind remain what it was, when it has nothing left of that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall it carry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows itself only by favour of that body? A few memories of their common life? Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space and in unlimited time?

“But,” I shall be told, “there is more in us than our intelligence discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not placed there; we contain a greater being than the one we know.”

That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by the inconscient, that is to say, by that which represents the universe, is enormous and preponderant. But how shall the ego which we know and whose destiny alone concerns us recognize all those things and that greater being neither of which it has ever known? What will it do in the presence of that stranger? If I be told that the stranger is myself, I will readily agree; but was that which upon earth felt and weighed my joys and sorrows and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was that this impassive, unseen stranger who existed in me all unsuspected, even as I am probably about to live in him without his concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the sorry recollection of a thing that has ceased to be? Now that he has taken my place, while destroying, in order to acquire a larger consciousness, all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my head, not even brushing with their new-born wings the being which I am conscious of to-day?

Lastly, how shall we explain that, in that consciousness which ought to survive us, the infinity that precedes our birth has left no trace? Had we no consciousness in that infinity, or did we perchance lose it on coming into the world and did the catastrophe that produces the whole terror of death take place at the moment of our birth? None can deny that this infinity has the same rights over us as that which follows our decease. We are as much the children of the first as of the second; and we must of necessity have a part in both. If you maintain that you will always exist, you are bound to admit that you have always existed; we cannot imagine the one without having to imagine the other. If nothing ends, nothing begins, for any such beginning would be the end of something. Now, although I have existed since all time, I have no consciousness whatever of my previous existence, whereas I shall have to carry to the boundless horizon of the endless ages the tiny consciousness acquired during the instant that elapses between my birth and my death. Can my true ego, then, which is about to become eternal, date only from my short sojourn on this earth? And all the preceding eternity, which is of exactly the same value as that which follows, since it is the same, shall it not count? Will it be flung into nihility? Why is a strange privilege accorded to a few meaningless days spent on an unimportant planet? Is it because in that previous eternity we had no consciousness? What do we know about it? It seems very unlikely. Why should the acquisition of consciousness be a phenomenon unrepeated in an eternity that had at its disposal innumerable billions of chances, among which—unless we set a limit to the infinity of the ages—it is impossible to conceive that the thousands of coincidences which went to form my present consciousness did not occur over and over again? The moment we turn our gaze upon the mysteries of that eternity wherein all that happens must already have happened, it seems much more credible, on the contrary, that we have had consciousness upon consciousness which our life of to-day hides from our view. If they have existed and if, at our death, one consciousness must survive, the others must survive as well, for there is no reason to bestow so disproportionate a favour upon that consciousness which we have acquired here below. And, if all of them survive and awaken at the same time, what will become of the petty consciousness of a few terrestrial moments, when it is submerged in those eternal existences? Besides, even if it were to forget all its previous existences, what would become of it amid the perpetual buffeting, the endless wash of its posthumous eternity? For it is but as a poor sand-drift of an island in the unrelenting jaws of two boundless oceans. It would hold its own there, puny and so precarious, only on condition that it acquired nothing more, that it remained for ever closed, isolated and confined, impenetrable and insensible to all things, in the midst of the astounding mysteries, the fabulous treasures and visions which it would have eternally to pass through without ever seeing or hearing anything; and that surely would be the worst death and the worst destiny that could befall us. We are, therefore, driven on all sides towards the theories of an universal consciousness or of a modified consciousness, both of which we shall examine presently.

CHAPTER IV

THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS

But, before broaching those questions, it were perhaps well to study two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival, solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement, of some magnitude in certain countries, has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence. It cannot be denied that of all the religious theories, reincarnation is the most plausible and the least repellent to our reason. Nor must we overlook that it has on its side the authority of the most ancient and widespread religions, those which have incontestably furnished humanity with the greatest aggregate of wisdom and which we have not yet exhausted of their truths and mysteries. In reality, the whole of Asia, whence we derive almost everything which we know, has always believed and still believes in the transmigration of souls.

As Mrs. Annie Besant, the remarkable apostle of the new theosophy, very rightly says:

“There is no philosophical doctrine which has behind it so magnificent an intellectual ancestry as the doctrine of reincarnation; none for which there is such a weight of the opinion of the wisest of men; none, as Max Müller declared, on which the greatest philosophers of humanity have been so thoroughly in accord.”

This is all quite true. But it would need other proofs to win our distrustful faith to-day. I have sought in vain for a single one in the leading works of our modern theosophists. They confine themselves to a mere reiteration of dogmatic statements, which are of the vaguest. Their great argument—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument which they adduce—is but a sentimental argument. Their doctrine that the soul, in its successive existences, is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right; and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric Heaven and the monstrous Hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are for ever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has but an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagines. As Sir William Crookes so well puts it, in a remarkable passage:

“It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediaeval mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.”

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, that is to say, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but, when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that, by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms and so forth. It is rather surprising that those who call themselves “clairvoyants,” who pretend to be in communication with this world of discarnate spirits and with other worlds still nearer to the divine, bring us no evidential proofs. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others, phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible? We are only too eager to allow ourselves to be convinced, for all that adds anything to man’s importance, range or duration must needs be gladly welcomed.[3]

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Footnote 3:

To learn the precise truth about the neotheosophical movement and its first manifestations, the reader should study the striking report drawn up, after an impartial, but strict enquiry, by Dr. Hodgson, who was sent to India for this special purpose by the Society for Psychical Research. In it he unveils, in a masterly fashion, the obvious and often clumsy impositions of the famous Mme. Blavatsky and the whole neotheosophical organization (Proceedings, Vol. III, pp. 201-400: Hodgson’s Report on Phenomena connected with Theosophy).

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CHAPTER V

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC
HYPOTHESIS: APPARITIONS

Outside theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year, the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and, as early as 1873 or 1874, he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real inauguration of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society of Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S.P.R. This society was formed in London, twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England and has, as we know, made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration; in a word, it is hardly possible to contest the essential veracity of the majority of them, unless we begin by making up our minds to deny any positive value to human evidence and by making any conviction, any certainty impossible that derives its source therefrom.[4] Among those supernormal manifestations, telepathy, telergy, previsions and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: (1) real, objective and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; (2) manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character,[5] or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. We will stop for a moment to consider those extraordinary communications. They have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism; they profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

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Footnote 4:

How strict these investigations are is shown by the perpetual attacks on the S.P.R. in the spiritualistic press, which constantly refers to it as the Society “for the suppression of facts,” “for the wholesale imputation of imposture,” “for the discouragement of the sensitive and for the repudiation of every revelation of the kind which was said to be pressing itself upon humanity from the regions of light and knowledge.”

Footnote 5:

It would, however, be unjust to assert that all these apparitions are open to question. For instance, it is impossible to deny the reality of the celebrated Katie King, the double of Florence Cook, whose actions and movements were rigorously investigated and controlled by a man like Sir William Crookes for a period of three years. But, looked upon as a proof of survival—notwithstanding that Katie King professed to be a dead person who had returned to earth to expiate certain sins—her manifestations are not so valuable as the communications obtained since her time. In any case, they bring us no revelation concerning existence beyond the grave; and Katie, who was so young, so much alive, whose pulsations could be counted, whose heart was heard beating, who was photographed, who distributed locks of her hair to those present, who replied to every question put to her, Katie herself never uttered a word on the subject of the secrets of the next world.

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As concerns the manifestations of the first category, it is, of course, impossible to give even a summary account of the most striking of them in these pages; and I refer the reader to the volumes of the Proceedings. It is enough to remember that numerous apparitions of deceased persons have been investigated and studied by men of science like Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Dale Owen, Professor Aksakof, Paul Gibier and others. Gurney, who is one of the classics of this new science, gives two hundred and thirty instances of this sort; and, since then, the Journal of the S.P.R. and the spiritualistic reviews have never ceased to record new ones. It appears therefore to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflexion of life is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, of surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.