d we forget that, in the present state of our knowledge, nothing
authorises us to affirm that there may not be a kind of more or less
conscious, more or less responsible after-life, that shall in no way
depend on the decisions of an external will. He would indeed be rash
who should venture to maintain that nothing survives, either in us or
in others, of the efforts of our good intentions and the acquirements
of our mind. It may be--and serious experiments, though they do not
seem to prove the phenomenon, may still allow us to class it among
scientific possibilities--it may be that a part of our personality, of
our nervous force, may escape dissolution. How vast a future would
then be thrown open to the laws that unite cause to effect, and that
always end by creating justice when they come into contact with the
human soul, and have centuries before them! Let us not forget that
Nature at least is logical, even though we call her unjust; and were we
to resolve on injustice, our difficulty would be that we must also be
logical; and when logic comes into touch with our thoughts and our
feelings, our intentions and passions, what is there that
differentiates it from justice?

22

Let us form no too hasty conclusion; too many points are still
uncertain. Should we seek to imitate what we term the injustice of
Nature, we would run the risk of imitating and fostering only the
injustice that is in ourselves. When we say that Nature is unjust, we
are in effect complaining of her indifference to our own little
virtues, our own little intentions, our own little deeds of heroism;
and it is our vanity, far more than our sense of equity, that considers
itself aggrieved. Our morality is proportioned to our stature and our
restricted destiny; nor have we the right to forsake it because it is
not on the scale of the immensity and infinite destiny of the universe.

And further, should it even be proved that Nature is unjust at all
points, the other question remains intact: whether the command be laid
upon man to follow Nature in her injustice. Here we shall do well to
let our own consciousness speak, rather than listen to a voice so
formidable that we hear not a word it utters, and are not even certain
whether words there be. Reason and instinct tell us that it is right
to follow the counsels of Nature; but they tell us also that we should
not follow those counsels when they clash with another instinct within
us, one that is n