ffered to us by the best
and strongest proof has given us our reason to employ loyally and
fully, that is to say, to try to attain, before all and in all things,
that which appears to be the truth. Can He exact that we should
accept, in spite of it, a belief of which the wisest and the most
ardent do not, from the human point of view, deny the uncertainty?
He proposes for our consideration a very doubtful story which, even
if scientifically established, would prove nothing and which is
buttressed by prophecies and miracles no less uncertain. If not by
our reason, by what then would He have us decide? By usage? By the
accidents of race or birth, by some aesthetic or sentimental hazard? Or
has He set within us another higher and surer faculty before which the
understanding must yield? If so, where is it? What is its name? If
that God punishes us for not having blindly followed a faith that
does not force itself irresistibly upon the intelligence which He
gave us; if He chastises us for not having made, in the presence of
the great enigma with which He confronts us, a choice which condemns
the best and most divine part of that which He has placed in us,
we have nothing left to reply: we are the dupes of a cruel and
incomprehensible sport, we are the victims of a terrible snare and an
immense injustice; and, whatever the torments wherewith the latter
loads us, they will be less intolerable than the eternal presence of
its Author.

XI

ANNIHILATION IMPOSSIBLE

Here we stand before the abyss. It is void of all the dreams with
which our fathers peopled it. They thought that they knew what was
there; we know only what is not there. It has enlarged itself with all
that we have learnt to know nothing of. While waiting for a scientific
certainty to break through its darkness--for man has the right to hope
for that which he does not yet conceive--the only point that interests
us, because it is situated in the little circle which our actual
intelligence traces in the thickest blackness of the night, is to know
whether the unknown for which we are bound will be dreadful or not.

Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no
more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day;
survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival with
universal consciousness different from that which we possess in this
world.

Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infin