llection of a thing that is no more? Now that he has taken my
place, while destroying, in order to acquire a greater 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 wings that which I feel myself
to be to-day?

XV

IF IT WERE POSSIBLE, IT WOULD
NOT BE DREADFUL

It seems, therefore, that a survival with our present consciousness is
as impossible and as incomprehensible as total annihilation. Moreover,
even if it were admissible, it would not be dreadful. It is certain
that, when the body disappears, all physical sufferings will disappear
at the same time; for we cannot imagine a soul suffering in a body
which it no longer possesses. With them will vanish simultaneously all
that we call mental or moral sufferings, seeing that all of them, if
we examine them well, spring from the ties and habits of our senses.
Our soul feels the reaction of the sufferings of our body, or of
the bodies that surround it; it cannot suffer in itself or through
itself. Slighted affection, shattered love, disappointments, failures,
despair, treachery, personal humiliations, as well as the afflictions
and the loss of those whom it loves, acquire the sting that hurts it
only by passing through the body which it animates. Outside its own
sorrow, which is the sorrow of not knowing, the soul, once delivered
from its body, could suffer only at the recollection of that body. It
is possible that it still grieves over the troubles of those whom it
has left behind on earth. But, in the eyes of that which no longer
counts the days, those troubles will seem so brief that it will not
grasp their duration; and, knowing what they are and whither they
lead, it will not behold their severity.

The soul is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only
for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It
can grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those
limits, when one is no longer bound by space and time, is already to
transcend them.

XVI

THE SURVIVAL WITHOUT
CONSCIOUSNESS

There remains but the survival without consciousness, or survival with
a consciousness different from that of to-day.

A survival without consciousness seems at first sight the most
probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the
other side of the grav