ANNIHILATION
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.