We might perhaps meet death with a
desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul
to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears
the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were
destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long
last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented
Earth. But is it certain?
And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective
consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe,
and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual
consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal?
In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a
consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined
to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat,
a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that
inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by
living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound
longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to
star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of
transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe
that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less
degree, extends through everything.
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