CONCLUSIONS
1
In order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory,
let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have
put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and
total annihilation. Annihilation is physically impossible; the religious
solutions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human
reason does not penetrate. Next comes the hypothesis of the survival of
our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired
consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this hypothesis,
strictly defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be
desired, although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our
ills, it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other
hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear
less barbarous or less crude, we come back to the hypothesis of a cosmic
consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that
of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every
supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination.
Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to
annihilation pure and simple and consequently would be no more dreadful
than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with no
awakening. The hypothesis is unquestionably more acceptable than that of
annihilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic
consciousness and of a modified consciousness.
2
Before replying to these, we must choose our universe, for we have the
choice. It is a matter of knowing how we propose to look at infinity. Is
it the moveless, immovable infinity, from all eternity perfect and at
its zenith, and the purposeless universe that our reason will conceive
at the farthest point of our thoughts? Do we believe that, at our death,
the illusion of movement and progress which we see from the depths of
this life will suddenly fade away? If so, it is inevitable that, at our
last breath, we shall be absorbed in what, for lack of a better term, we
call the cosmic consciousness. Are we, on the other hand, persuaded that
death will reveal to us that the illusion lies not in our senses, but in
our reason and that, in a world incontestably alive, despite the
eternity preceding our birth, all the experiments have not been made,
that is to say that movement and evolution continue and will never and
nowhere stop? In that case, we must at once accept the hypothesis of a
modified or progressive consciousness. The two aspects, after all, are
equally unintelligible, but defensible; and, although really
irreconcilable, they agree on one point, namely, that unending pain and
unredeemed misery are alike excluded from them both for ever.
3
The hypothesis of a modified consciousness does not necessitate the loss
of the tiny consciousness acquired in our body; but it makes it almost
negligible, flings, drowns and dissolves it in infinity. It is of course
impossible to support this hypothesis with satisfactory proofs; but it
is not easy to shatter it like the others. Were it permissible to speak
of likeness to truth in this connexion, when our only truth is that we
do not see the truth, it is the most likely of the interim hypotheses
and gives a magnificent opening for the most plausible, the most varied
and the most alluring dreams. Will our ego, our soul, our spirit, or
whatever we call that which will survive us in order to continue us as
we are, will it find again, on leaving the body, the innumerable lives
which it must have lived since the thousands of years that had no
beginning? Will it continue to increase by assimilating all that it
meets in infinity during the thousands of years that will have no end?
Will it linger for a time around our earth, leading, in regions
invisible to our eyes, an ever higher and happier existence, as the
theosophists and spiritualists contend? Will it move towards other
planetary systems, will it emigrate to other worlds whose existence is
not even suspected by our senses? Everything seems permissible in this
great dream, save that which might arrest its flight.
Nevertheless, so soon as it ventures too far in the ultramondane spaces,
it crashes into strange obstacles and breaks its wings against them. If
we admit that our ego does not remain eternally what it was at the
moment of our death, we can no longer imagine that, at a given second,
it stops, ceases to expand and rise, attains its perfection and its
fulness, to become no more than a sort of motionless wreck suspended in
eternity and a finished thing in the midst of that which will never
finish. That would indeed be the only real death and the more fearful
inasmuch as it would set a limit to an unparalleled life and
intelligence, beside which those which we possess here below would not
even weigh what a drop of water weighs when compared with the ocean, or
a grain of sand when placed in the scales with a mountain-chain. In a
word, either we believe that our evolution will one day stop, implying
thereby an incomprehensible end and a sort of inconceivable death; or we
admit that it has no limit, whereupon, being infinite, it assumes all
the properties of infinity and must needs be lost in infinity and united
with it. This, withal, is the latter end of theosophy, spiritualism and
all the religions in which man, in his ultimate happiness, is absorbed
by God. And this again is an incomprehensible end, but at least it is
life. And then, taking one incomprehensibility with another, after doing
all that is humanly possible to understand one or the other riddle, let
us by preference leap into the greatest and therefore the most probable,
the one which contains all the others and after which nothing more
remains. If not, the questions reappear at every stage and the answers
are always conflicting. And questions and answers lead us to the same
inevitable abyss. As we shall have to face it sooner or later, why not
make for it straightway? All that happens to us in the interval
interests us beyond a doubt, but does not detain us, because it is not
eternal.
4
Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness. Although
we are incapable of understanding the act of an infinity that would have
to fold itself up in order to feel itself and consequently to define
itself and separate itself from other things, this is not an adequate
reason for declaring it impossible; for, if we were to reject all the
realities and impossibilities that we do not understand, there would be
nothing left for us to live upon. If this consciousness exist under the
form which we have conceived, it is evident that we shall be there and
take part in it. If there be a consciousness somewhere, or some thing
that takes the place of consciousness, we shall be in that consciousness
or that thing, because we cannot be elsewhere. And, as this
consciousness or this thing cannot be unhappy, because it is impossible
that infinity should exist for its own unhappiness, neither shall we be
unhappy when we are in it. Lastly, if the infinity into which we shall
be projected have no sort of consciousness nor anything that stands for
it, the reason will be that consciousness or anything that might replace
it is not indispensable to eternal happiness.
5
That, I think, is about as much as we may be permitted to declare, for
the moment, to the spirit anxiously facing the unfathomable space
wherein death will shortly hurl it. It can still hope to find there the
fulfilment of its dreams; it will perhaps find less to dread than it had
feared. If it prefer to remain expectant and to accept none of the
hypotheses which I have expounded to the best of my power and without
prejudice, it nevertheless seems difficult not to welcome, at least,
this great assurance which we find at the bottom of every one of them,
namely, that infinity could not be malevolent, seeing that, if it
eternally tortured the least among us, it would be torturing something
which it cannot tear out of itself and that it would therefore be
torturing its very self.
I have added nothing to what was already known. I have simply tried to
separate what may be true from that which is assuredly not true; for, if
we do not know where truth is, we nevertheless learn to know where it is
not. And, perhaps, in seeking for that undiscoverable truth, we shall
have accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the last hour by
looking it full in the face. Many things, beyond a doubt, remain to be
said which others will say with greater force and brilliancy. But we
need have no hope that any one will utter on this earth the word that
shall put an end to our uncertainties. It is very probable, on the
contrary, that no one in this world, nor perhaps in the next, will
discover the great secret of the universe. And, if we reflect upon this
even for a moment, it is most fortunate that it should be so. We have
not only to resign ourselves to living in the incomprehensible, but to
rejoice that we cannot go out of it. If there were no more insoluble
questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and
then we should have for ever to curse the fate that placed us in a
universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but
a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and the
unknowable are necessary and will perhaps always be necessary to our
happiness. In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his
understanding a thousandfold loftier and a thousandfold mightier than
mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had
surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to
grasp the least tittle.
THE END
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Transcriber's Notes
Obviously typographical errors have been silently corrected. Nothing
else has been changed.