Part 3 — CHAPTER V. REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—Concluded. Idealism, Materialism, Monism. (continued 2)

Love under the form of eternity.

True love should never be expressed in the language of time. We say: “I loved my father during his lifetime; I was deeply attached to my mother or my sister.” Why locate it in the past? Why not say always: “I love my father or my mother?” Does not, and should not, love lay claim to an eternal present?

Uniqueness of the individual.

How could one say to a mother that there is nothing truly and definitively alive, personal, unique, in the at once smiling and meditative eyes of the child she holds upon her knees; that the little being that she dreams of mature, and good, and great, is a simple incident in the life of the species? No; her child is not like any other that has ever lived or that ever will live; none other could possess that look. Nowhere among the generations of men can there exist a fac-simile of the beloved face before one. All nature does not possess the equivalent of the individual, which it can destroy, but not replace. It is not, therefore, without reason that love refuses to consent to the substitution of one individual for another, which constitutes the very movement of life; it cannot reconcile itself to the eternal whirl in the dust of being; it is bent on fixing life, on arresting the world in mid-progress. But the world does not stop at its bidding. The future calls to generation after generation, and this powerful force of attraction is also a force of dissolution. Nature gives birth by means of death, and the joy of new loves is composed of the fragments of the old.

The protest of love against death not limited to humanity.

This protest of love against death, against the dissolution of the individual, attaches also to the lower animals. A dog, it seems, has only a market value, and yet can I ever buy again one that shall be the equivalent of this one that has died before my eyes? He loved me with all the power of his unhappy being, and endeavoured to hold fast to me while he was slipping away, and I endeavoured to hold him fast. Does not every being that loves acquire a right to immortality? Yes; the ideal of affection would be to immortalize all conscious beings; nay, more, the poet who is delicately sensitive to the individuality of a flower, or a ray of coloured light, of the drop of dew that refracts it, would wish to immortalize all nature, would wish to view under the form of eternity the rainbow that quivers in a soap bubble; for can any two bubbles ever be the same? And yet, while the poet aims thus at holding everything fast, at preserving everything, at fixing his dreams, at enchaining the ocean of life, the man of science replies that the eternal flood must be allowed to pulsate, to engulf our tears and our blood, and that the world must be left free. For the man of science, the flux and reflux and progress of life are more sacred than the love of the individual.

Antagonism between love and science.

Thus, in the question of individual immortality, two great forces drag human thought in opposite directions. Science is inclined everywhere to sacrifice the individual in the name of natural evolution; love is inclined, in the name of a higher moral and social evolution, to preserve the individual. The antinomy is one of the most disquieting that the philosophic mind has to deal with.

The best in one may survive.

Should science be admitted to be wholly in the right, or must we believe that an element of truth exists in the social instinct which lies at the basis of affection, as there is a presentiment and anticipation of the truth in all great natural instincts? The social instinct possesses a greater value at the present day, because philosophers are beginning to consider even the individual as a society, and to recognize association as a universal law of nature. Love, which is the power of cohesion at its highest degree, is perhaps right in its desire for an element in the association between individuals. Its sole error is that of exaggerating its pretensions and of misplacing its hopes. After all, one must not be too exacting nor ask too much of nature. A true philosopher, even for those that he loves, should not shrink from proof by fire, and death is the flame that purifies while it consumes. If anything survives the ordeal that alone is much, and if what survives is precisely what is best in us, what more can be asked? One may break the vase, of which Epictetus speaks, but the perfume remains, and floats out into the air, and becomes, no doubt, ultimately indistinguishable, but still subsists.

Sociology and the problem of immortality.

The science which seems to offer the strongest opposition to the preservation of the individual is mathematics, which recognizes the existence of nothing in the world but variable and equivalent figures and abstractions. On the contrary, perhaps the most concrete of the sciences, sociology, recognizes everywhere groups of realities; sociology therefore cannot hold relations that arise out of association, nor the terms between which they exist, so cheap. Let us consider whether, from the point of view of a more complete and more concrete science, consciousness, which is the principle of personality, properly so called, necessarily and forever excludes the possibility of indefinite duration that all great sciences attribute to the spirit.

The basis of existence not substance but activity.

III. Antique metaphysics gave too much attention to questions of substance, to considering whether the soul is simple or complex. The question amounts to whether the soul is made of indivisible or divisible material; it assumes as the basis of the phenomena of mind, an imaginary and in some sort extended substance. It was upon this doctrine of the simple substance that the demonstration of the immortality of the soul was founded. Evolutionist philosophy tends to fix our attention nowadays, not on the substance, but on the way the substance behaves, that is to say, in physical terms, on movements.[166] Consciousness is a certain action accompanied by a certain collective unity of movements. If it exists in a substance it is not the duration of this substance that interests us, but that of its activity, since it is that activity which constitutes our consciousness.

Continuity of existence means continuity of function.

Wundt is one of the contemporary philosophers, who, after Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, has best shown the illusiveness of endeavouring to discover a simple substance underlying consciousness. It is only internal experience, he says, only consciousness itself, that comes to us guaranteed by immediate certainty. And this implies, he adds, “that all these substances which spiritualism regards as the basis of subjective or objective experience are of the highest degree of uncertainty, for in no experience whatsoever are they given. They are deliberate fictions, by the aid of which it has been attempted to explain the unity of experience.” The true explanation of this unity should be sought for elsewhere in continuity of function, and not in simplicity of substance. “The consecutive effects of anterior states combine with those which arise later; in this way there is caused a subjective continuity of states which corresponds to the objective continuity of movement, which is the condition of unity of consciousness.” The binding together of successive mental states is lacking in bodies, although they must possess the germ of action and of sensation. For this reason Leibnitz was right in saying that bodies are “momentary spirits,” which forget everything immediately, and know only a present, uncomplicated by a past or a future. Conscious life, on the contrary, by the very means of changing elements, realizes a continuity of mental functions, a memory of the past, a certain durability. This continuity is not a result of simplicity, but, on the contrary, of the higher complexity that belongs to mental functions. “On the physical side, as on the psychical side,” says Wundt, “the living body is a unity; this unity is not founded in simplicity but in compositeness of a high degree of complexity. Consciousness, with its multitude of combined states, is a unity analogous to that of the bodily organism. The absolute correlation between the physical and the psychical suggests the following hypothesis:[167] that what we call the soul is the internal aspect of what, in its external aspect, we call the body that contains the soul. This way of conceiving the problem of correlation inevitably leads us to the belief that the essence of reality is intellectual, and that the fundamental attribute of being is development or evolution. Human consciousness is the highest point of such evolution; it constitutes the nodal point in the course of nature where the world recollects itself. It is not as a simple being but as a product evolved out of innumerable elements that the human soul is, as Leibnitz says, ‘a mirror of the world.’”[168]

The problem of immortality at the present day.

From this modern point of view, which is a development of that of Aristotle,[169] the question of immortality amounts to asking how far the continuity of mental functions may be supposed to extend the continuity of one’s intellectual being, which is the subjective unity of a complex multiplicity aware of itself as such?

Indissoluble material compounds.

Note, first, that even in the external world we are not without examples of indissoluble compounds; certain simple atoms are compounds of this sort. The atom of hydrogen is a vortex of little worlds. Well, is there nothing indissoluble in the universe except so-called atoms, so-called physical “individuals,” and is it unpermissible to conceive, on the subjective side, individuals more worthy of the name, whose duration is guaranteed by the very fact of their complexity?

Restatement of the problem.

According to the reigning doctrines in physiology and experimental psychology, individual consciousness is, as we have said, a compound of the consciousnesses of all the cells that are united in the physical organism.[170] The individual, consisting thus of a society, the problem of death amounts to the question, whether there can exist an association, at once solid enough to endure forever, and flexible enough to adapt itself to the ever-shifting conditions of universal evolution.

The ideal type of association.

This problem, be it observed in the first place, is precisely that which human societies are endeavouring to solve. At the lowest stage of social evolution solidity and flexibility are rarely united. Egypt, for example, was solid but not very progressive. A stage higher in the scale of evolution, in proportion as science advances and personal liberty comes to be recognized, civilization becomes both more solid and indefinitely flexible, and at some period in the future, when scientific civilization shall have once mastered the globe, it will possess a power that the most compact, and, in appearance, the solidest masses cannot equal; it will be firmer than the very pyramids, and will at the same time prove increasingly flexible, progressive, capable of adaptation to every variation in the environment. The synthesis of complexity and stability will then have been achieved. The very character of thought is increasing adaptivity, and the more intellectual a being is, the greater its power of displaying the qualities which are most advantageous under any given set of circumstances. The eye, which is more intellectual than the sense of touch, furnishes a power of adaptation to a wider and more diversified environment. Thought, which is more intellectual than sight, enables one to adapt one’s self to the universe itself, to the immensity of the stars, as well as to the infinite pettiness of the atoms in a drop of water. If memory is a masterpiece of intellectual record-taking, reasoning is a masterpiece of flexibility, of mobility, and of progress. So that, whether individuals or nations are in question, the most intellectual are those which possess at once the greatest amount of stability and of adaptability. The problem of society is to unite these two things, the problem of immortality is at bottom the same; the individual consciousness being, as we have seen, itself a society. From this point of view, it seems probable that the more perfect one’s personal consciousness is, the more absolutely it possesses both durability and a power of indefinite metamorphosis. So that, even admitting what the Pythagoreans insist upon, that consciousness is a number, a harmony, a musical chord, we may still ask whether certain harmonies may not become sufficiently perfect to endure forever without, on that account, ceasing to enter as elements into richer and more complex harmonies. A lyre might vibrate ad infinitum without its several strings losing their respective tonalities amid the multitude of their variations. There ought to exist an evolution in the organization of consciousness as in the organization of molecules and living cells, and the most vital and durable and flexible combinations should possess the advantage in the struggle for existence.

The last stage in the struggle for existence.

Consciousness is a collection of associations of ideas, and, consequently, of habits, grouped about a centre; and we know that habits possess an indefinite duration; contemporary philosophy regards the properties of elementary material substances as habits, as instances of indissoluble association. A vegetable or animal species is a habit, a type of grouping and organic form which subsists century after century. It is not proved that mental habits may not in the course of evolution achieve a fixity and a durability of which we possess to-day no example. It is not proved that instability is the definitive and eternal characteristic of the highest functions of consciousness. A philosophic hopefulness in regard to immortality is founded on the belief that, in the last stages of evolution, the struggle for existence will become a struggle for immortality. Nature will then come to realize, not by virtue of simplicity, but of judicious complexity, a sort of progressive immortality, the final product of natural selection; and, if so, religious symbols will have been simply an anticipation of this final period. We shall have wings to support us in our flight through life, Rückert says, wings to support us in our flight past death; but the bird does not learn to fly immediately nor at once; the hereditary habit of flight must have been acquired and developed by the species because of the advantage it brings with it in the struggle for existence. Survival, therefore, must not be conceived as completed at a bound, but as slowly perfected by a gradual and continuous lengthening of the average span of life. It must be shown, however, that such a survival would constitute a superiority, not only for the individual, but for the species.

Psychology and the communion of souls.

And now let us consider consciousnesses in their relations to each other. Contemporary psychology tends to the doctrine that different consciousnesses, or if you prefer, different aggregates of states of consciousness, may combine, and even interpenetrate, somewhat analogously to what theologians mean by communion of souls. And if so, it is permissible to ask whether, if consciousnesses can interpenetrate, they may not some day come to possess a continuity of existence; may not be able to hand on their existence to each other, and to communicate to each other a new sort of durability instead of remaining, as Leibnitz says, more or less momentary; supposing always that such durability would be advantageous to the species.

Possible frequency of the phenomenon.

Mystical intuitions sometimes contain a certain presentiment of the truth. St. Paul tells us that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, that prophecies and languages shall pass away, but that one thing shall not pass, and that is charity, or love. If this doctrine is to be interpreted philosophically, the bond of continual love, which is of all bonds the least primitive and the most complex, must be conceived as capable of ultimately becoming the most durable of bonds, and as tending progressively to embrace a larger and larger proportion of the whole number of the inhabitants of the celestial city. It is by what is best, what is most disinterested, most impersonal, and most loving in one, that one achieves communion with the consciousness of another, and such disinterestedness must coincide ultimately with disinterestedness in others, with others’ love for one’s self; and there will arise thus a possible fusion of souls, a communion so intense that as one suffers in the bosom of another, so, too, one may come to live in the heart of another. To be sure, we have passed here into the limits of dreamland, but it is to be remarked that such dreams are extra-scientific, and not anti-scientific.

Vision of the ideal society.

Let us conceive ourselves as existing in this problematical, though not impossible, epoch when individual consciousnesses shall have achieved a higher degree of complexity and of subjective unity, and along with them a power of more intimate communion than they possess to-day, without the fact of that communion altogether breaking down the bounds of personality. They will communicate thus with each other, as the living cells in the same body sympathize with each other, and contribute each to form the collective consciousness; they will be all in all, and all in every part. And indeed one may readily conceive means of communication and of sympathy, much more subtle and direct than those which exist to-day among different individuals. The science of the nervous system is in its earliest stages; we are acquainted as yet with exaltation as a state of disease only, and with suggestion at a distance as an incident merely of hypnotism; but we already begin to be dimly aware of a whole world of phenomena that go to show the possibility of a direct communication between different, and even under certain circumstances of a sort of reciprocal absorption of two personalities. Some such complete fusion of two consciousnesses, that however still preserve their individuality, is to-day the dream of love which, as one of the greatest of social forces, ought not to labour in vain. Supposing the power of communion with other consciousnesses gradually to develop, the death of the individual will manifestly encounter a greater and greater resistance on the part of the several minds with which such an individual is in communication. And, in any event, the minds with which an individual is in communication will tend to retain an increasingly vivid, and, so to speak, living memory of him. Memory at the present day is simply an absolutely distinct representation of a certain being—an image, as it were, vibrating in the ether after the original has disappeared. The reason is that there does not as yet exist an intimate solidarity and continuous communication between one individual and another. But it is possible to conceive an image which would be scarcely distinguishable from the object represented; would be the sum of what such and such an object means to me; would be, as it were, the prolongation of the effect of another consciousness on my consciousness. Such an image might be regarded as a point of contact between the two consciousnesses involved. Just as in generation the two factors combine in a certain third, which represents them both, so such an animated and beloved image, instead of being passive, would constitute a component part of the collective energy and purpose of one’s being; would count for one in the complex whole that one calls a mind or a consciousness.

Personal immortality.

According to this hypothesis, the problem would be, to be at once loving enough and beloved enough to live and survive in the minds of others. The individual, in so far as his external accidents are concerned, would disappear; but what is best in him would survive in the souls of those he loves who love him. A ray of sunlight may for a time record upon a bit of dead paper the lines of a face that no longer exists among the living; nay, human art may go farther, and impart to canvas or to stone the minutest resemblances to human life; but art has not yet succeeded in imparting a soul to Galatea. Love must be added to art to achieve that miracle—men must love each other so completely that they become identified in the universal consciousness. When that consummation has been reached, each of us will live completely, and without loss, in the love of our fellows. The power of love is not limited, like that of light, to giving permanence to the outward appearances of life; it is capable of lending stability to life itself.

Elimination of death.

Separation on such an hypothesis would be as impossible as in the case of those atomic vortices of which we spoke above, which consisted each in a single individual, in the sense that no force could break them up into their elements; their unity lay not in their simplicity, but in their inseparability. Just so in the sphere of consciousness, a manifold of conscious states may conceivably form a luminous ring that can neither be broken nor extinguished. The atom, it has been said, is inviolable, and consciousness may come to be inviolable de facto.

Triumph of love.

Nay, one’s secondary and reflected life in the minds of other people might even come to be more important than the original of which it is a copy, insomuch that a gradual process of substitution might take place, a substitution of which death would simply mark the definitive and tranquil accomplishment. We might feel ourselves, even in this life, entering into possession of an immortality in the hearts of those who love us. Such an immortality would be a species of new creation. Morality, and religion even, are in our judgment simply the outcome of moral productivity; such an immortality would be simply an ultimate manifestation of the same thing. And if it were once achieved, the opposition that the man of science to-day perceives between the continuation of the species and the immortality of the individual would have disappeared in a final synthesis. Death closes one’s eyes, but love stands by to open them again.

Complete survival of the individual.

The point of contact might thus be found between life and immortality. At the beginning of evolution, death was the end of the individual and the light of consciousness ended in obscurity. By virtue of moral and social progress, one’s friends tend to remember one after death with increasing intensity and for longer and longer periods; the image that survives the original fades only by degrees, and more and more slowly, as the course of evolution advances. And it may be that, at some time in the future, the memory of beloved beings will so mingle with the life and the blood of each new generation, and will be so passed on from one to the other, that it will become a permanent element in the current of conscious existence. Such a persistent memory of the individual would be a gain in power for the species, for they who remember love more dearly than they who forget, and to love dearly is advantageous to the species. It is not, therefore, unpermissible to conceive a gradual increase in the faculty of memory by natural selection. The day may come when the individual will survive in as detailed and complete a fac-simile of what he was in his lifetime as can well be imagined, and death may become less significant than a period of absence; love will endow the beloved object with the mystery of eternal presence.

Exemplified to-day in isolated cases.

Even at the present day individuals here and there are sometimes so deeply loved that it is doubtful whether or no what is best in them does not survive their death, and their minds, unhappily subject to the weaknesses of humanity and unable as yet to break through the limitations of the physical organism, do not really succeed, by virtue of the love that surrounds them, in achieving an almost complete immortality even before their death. It is in the hearts of those who love them that they really live, and in all the world the corner that it really concerns them to be able to call their own lies in the affections of two or three people.

Destined to become common.

This phenomenon of mental palingenesis, which is at present isolated, may gradually come to be extended to the whole of the human species. Immortality may be an ultimate possession acquired by the species, as a whole, for the benefit of all of its members. Every individual consciousness may come to survive as a constituent part in a more comprehensive consciousness. Fraternity may, at some time in the future, be universal, render soul transparent to soul, and the ideal of morals and of religion be realized. Every soul will be reflected and mirrored in every other; although it will not suffice for that purpose simply to look into each other’s eyes unless one’s heart positively shines through them. One must project one’s own image into the mirror of the sea, if one is to find it there.

Possibility of a still more literal immortality.

It must, of course, be admitted that, if such speculations do not positively stretch away beyond the limits of possibility, they certainly do stretch away beyond the limits of actual science and experience, but precisely what renders all such hypotheses uncertain renders them also forever possible: namely, our irremediable ignorance of the basis of consciousness. Whatever discovery science may make in regard to consciousness and its conditions, it will never ascertain its essence, nor, consequently, the limits of its possible subsistence. Psychologically and metaphysically considered, what are conscious action and volition? Nay, what is unconscious activity, what is force, what is efficient causality? We do not know, we are obliged to define subjective activity and power in terms of objective motion, that is to say, in terms of their effect, and it will always be permissible for a philosopher to deny that motion, as a simple change of relations in space, constitutes the whole of an action, and that there are no uncaused movements, no relations between non-existent terms. And, if so, how are we to know precisely to what extent activity is essentially enduring as the emanation of a subjective power of which motion is, as it were, the visible sign, and of which consciousness is the immediate and intimate “apprehension.” Neither word nor act expresses all of us, something always remains unsaid, and will, perhaps, remain unsaid to the end of our lives—and beyond. It is possible that the foundation of personal consciousness is a power as incapable of being exhausted by any amount of activity as of being confined to any variety of forms.

Can never be disproved.

In any event the matter is, and always will be, a mystery, which arises from the fact that consciousness is sui generis, is absolutely inexplicable, and at bottom forever inaccessible to scientific formulæ and a fit subject, therefore, of metaphysical hypotheses. Just as being is the supreme genus, genus generalissimum, in the objective world, so consciousness is the supreme genus in the subjective world; so that no reply can ever be given to these two questions: What is being, and what is consciousness? Nor, therefore, to this third question, which depends upon the two preceding: Will consciousness continue to exist?

On an old dial, in a town in the south of France, may be read the legend: Sol non occidat! May the light not fail! Such is, indeed, the proper epilogue to fiat lux. Of all things in this world light is the one upon which we are most dependent; it, of all things, should have been created once for all, εἰς ἀεί; should pour down from the heavens through all eternity. And the light of the mind, which is more powerful than the light of the sun, may ultimately succeed in eluding the law of destruction which everywhere in the book of nature immediately follows the law of creation, and then only will the command, fiat lux, have been accomplished. Lux non occidat in æternum!

Stoicism the last resort.

IV. But, it will be asked, what consolation and encouragement is there in all this for those who do not feel the charm of these remote hypotheses concerning the outer limits of existence, for those who see death in all its brutality, and lean, as you yourself probably do, in the present state of the theory of evolution, somewhat toward purely negative conclusions? What can be said to them when they stand, as they believe they do, on the brink of annihilation? Nothing better could be said than the simple and somewhat unfeeling words of the ancient Stoics, who, be it remarked also, were themselves disbelievers in the immortality of the individual: “Be not a coward!” Deeply in the wrong as Stoicism was in the presence of death, in its insensibility to the pain of love which was the condition of its power and of its progress among mankind, when it interdicted attachment and commanded impassibility, it was right when it recommended insensibility to one’s own death. A man needs no other consolation than to feel that he has lived a complete life, that he has done his work, and that mankind is not the worse, nay, is perhaps the better for his having existed; and that whatever he has loved will survive, that the best of his dreams will somewhere be realized, that the impersonal element in his consciousness, the portion of the immortal patrimony of the human race, which has been intrusted to him and constitutes what is best in him, will endure and increase, and be passed on, without loss, to succeeding generations; that his own death is of no more importance, no more breaks the eternal continuity of things, than the shivering of a bit of a hand-glass does. To gain a complete consciousness of the continuity of life is to estimate death at its proper value, which is perhaps that of the disappearance of a kind of living illusion. Once more, in the name of reason, which is capable of understanding death, and of accepting it as it accepts whatsoever else is intelligible—be not a coward!

Dignity of resignation.

More than that, despair is grotesque because it is useless; cries and groans, at least such as are not purely reflex, originally served their purpose in the life of the species of arousing attention or pity, or of summoning aid; it is to the fact that it was once useful that the existence and propagation of the language of pain are due; but as there is no help against the inexorable, and no pity to be asked for in a matter that is in harmony with the interests of the totality of things and conformable to the dictates of our own thought, resignation alone is the proper attitude of mind, or rather a certain inner assent, or still better, a smile of detachment and intelligence and comprehension, and interest even in our own extinction. What is beautiful in the natural order of things cannot definitively excite despair.

Of considering one’s own case impersonally.

If anyone who has experienced the pangs of death should make light of the sort of consolation here referred to, we reply that we are not ourselves speaking in absolute ignorance of the visage of the supreme moment. We have ourselves had occasion more than once to look death in the face, less often no doubt than a soldier in active service; but we have had more time to consider it at our ease, and we have never found reason to desire that it should be veiled by an irrational belief. It is better to see and to know the truth; it is better not to tread the brink of the precipice with bandaged eyes. To disguise death is to pay it too great a compliment. We have had more than one example of it under our eyes. We have seen our grandfather, who, by the way, was himself not a believer, stricken down by successive attacks of apoplexy, and he said to us, smiling in the intervals of his pain, that he felt but one regret, and that was that so many superstitions should be in existence, and that Catholicism in particular (it was at that time when France was aiding the Papacy) should still be in power. Note also that the progress of science—in especial, of physiological and medical sciences—tends to increase the number of instances in which death is foreseen and is waited for almost with serenity. The least stoical of mankind sometimes feel the inclination toward an act of heroism, which, though in a measure forced upon them, is nevertheless not without its dignity. In the course of certain cases of protracted disease, such as consumption or cancer, the patient, if he possesses the necessary scientific qualifications, can calculate the probabilities of his life and determine within a few days at what time he will die. Bergot, whom I knew, was such a patient; Trousseau was another, and there have been many more. Knowing one’s self to be condemned, feeling one’s self to count for but one in the infinity of the universe, one can consider one’s self and one’s progress toward the unknown in a sense impersonally.

Sudden death a blessing.

If such a death is not without its bitterness, it is nevertheless the one which, of all others perhaps, is likely to prove attractive to a philosopher, to a mind with a passion for clearness, for foresight, for comprehension. For the rest, in the majority of cases, death takes its victims in the height of their vigour, in the midst of the struggle for existence; it is a matter of a few hours, like birth; its very suddenness renders it less redoubtable to the majority of mankind, who find it comparatively easy to be brave in the presence of a danger that is brief, and they hold out against the supreme enemy with the same obstinate courage that they would display against any other. On the contrary, when death approaches slowly, and deprives us of our strength by degrees, and each day leaves us in possession of something less than the day before, another source of consolation is open to us.

Decline in interest in life with decline in vitality.

It is a law of nature that diminution of vitality brings with it a proportionate diminution of desire; a man cares less keenly for what he feels himself less capable of attaining. Illness and old age always make us set less value upon the joys of which they deprive us which they first render bitter and then impossible; and the last joy of all, that of bare existence, is as subject to the law as its predecessors. Consciousness of one’s inability to live brings with it inability to desire to live; it becomes a burden to draw one’s breath. One feels one’s self dispersing, falling into dust, and no longer possessing the strength to check the process of decay. Moreover, egoism declines with declining strength; as we approach the grave we gain a power of estimating ourselves more nearly at our just value, of understanding that a faded flower has no right to live; that, as Marcus Aurelius said, “a ripe olive ought to fall from the tree.” One sentiment alone survives, a sense of weariness, of extreme weariness. We long for rest, long to relax the tension of life, to lie at ease, to have done with it once for all. Oh! to be no longer on one’s feet. The dying well know the supreme joy of looking forward to their last resting place! They no longer envy the interminable file of the living whom they perceive, as it were in a dream, vainly marching and countermarching upon the surface of the earth where they sleep. They are resigned to the solitude and abandonment of death. They are like travellers in the desert—worn with fever, and fatigue, and unwilling to make another step in advance; they are no longer borne up by the hope of revisiting familiar skies; they are unable to surmount the remaining difficulties of the way and request their companions to leave them, to march on without them, and, stretched upon the sand, watch without a tear, without a desire, the departing caravan creeping away toward the horizon.

Persistence of curiosity.

Naturally, some of us will always shrink before death, and wring our hands, and lose our self-possession. Some temperaments are subject to vertigo, to a horror of abysses, and in especial to a horror of the great abyss toward which all paths converge. Montaigne counsels such people to throw themselves blindly over the verge; others counsel them to fix their eyes till the end on some small mountain flower in the crevice of the rock. The manliest of mankind will give their attention to the depths of space and to the heavens, will fill their hearts with the immensity of the universe, will magnify their souls to the limits of the abyss, will subdue the rebellious individuality in themselves before it is forcibly subdued for them, and will scarcely be aware of the precipice till they have fairly passed beyond its brink. And for the philosopher, who is essentially a worshipper of the unknown, death possesses the attraction of novelty; birth only excepted, it is the most mysterious incident in life. Death has its secret, its enigma, and we are haunted by a vague hope that, as the final touch of irony, it may be revealed to us at the last moment; that the dying, according to the ancient belief, divine it and close their eyes only to shield them from an intolerable brightness. Man’s last agony and his last pulse of curiosity are one.