e, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful,
therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most
consistent with the present state of human thought, to set that limit
to their anxiety there. They have nothing to dread; for every fear, if
any remain, would, if we look into it carefully, deck itself with
hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind,
separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished,
scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the
great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without
dreams and without awakening.

But this is only a solution that flatters indolence. If we press those
who speak of a survival without consciousness, we perceive that they
mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and
we have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of
consciousness to persist in infinity.

Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that
of the universe into which their own will fall. But that means solving
very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the
night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a
man's brain.

XVII

THE SAME, CONTINUED

This question is closely allied to our modified consciousness. There
is for the moment no hope of solving it; but we are free to grope in
its darkness, which is not perhaps equally dense at all points.

Here begins the open sea. Here begins the glorious adventure, the only
one abreast with human curiosity, the only one that soars as high as
its highest longing. Let us accustom ourselves to regard death as a
form of life which we do not yet understand; let us learn to look
upon it with the same eye that looks upon birth; and soon our mind
will be accompanied to the steps of the tomb with the same glad
expectation that greets a birth. If, before being born, we were
permitted to choose between the great peace of non-existence and
a life that should not be completed by the magnificent hour of
death, which of us, knowing what we ought to know, would accept
the disquieting problem of an existence that would not end in the
reassuring mystery of its conclusion? Which of us would care to come
into a world where there is so little to learn, if he did not know
that he must enter it if he would leave it and learn more? The best
part of life is that it prepares this hour for us, that it is t