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doubt, subsist more than one idea powerful enough to allure the new
ego, which will nourish itself and thrive on all that it will find in
that new and endless environment, just as the other ego, on this
earth, nourished itself and throve on all that it met there. Since we
have been able to acquire our present consciousness, why should it be
impossible for us to acquire another? For that ego which is so dear to
us and which we believe ourselves to possess was not made in a day;
it is not at present what it was at the hour of our birth. Much
more chance than purpose has entered into it; and much more foreign
substance than any inborn substance which it contained. It is but a
long series of acquisitions and transformations, of which we do not
become aware until the awakening of our memory; and its nucleus, of
which we do not know the nature, is perhaps more immaterial and less
concrete than a thought. If the new environment which we enter on
leaving our mother's womb transforms us to such a point that there is,
so to speak, no connexion between the embryo that we were and the man
that we have become, is it not right to think that the much newer,
more unknown, wider and more fertile environment which we enter on
quitting life will transform us even more? One can see in what happens
to us here a figure of that which awaits us elsewhere and readily
admit that our spiritual being, liberated from its body, if it does
not mingle at the first onset with the infinite, will develop itself
there gradually, will choose itself a substance and, no longer
trammelled by space and time, will grow without end. It is very
possible that our loftiest wishes of to-day will become the law of our
future development. It is very possible that our best thoughts will
welcome us on the other bank and that the quality of our intellect
will determine that of the infinite that crystallizes around it. Every
hypothesis is permissible and every question, provided it be addressed
to happiness; for unhappiness is no longer able to answer us. It
finds no place in the human imagination that explores the future
methodically. And, whatever be the force that survives us and presides
over our existence in the other world, this existence, to presume the
worst, could be no less great, no less happy than that of to-day. It
will have no other career than infinity; and infinity is nothing if it
be not felicity. In any case, it seems fairly certain that we spend in
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