Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands
the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by
Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to
those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive
expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor
the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real
existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no
death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a
thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor
die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no
one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in
us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls
are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living
thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again
immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and
corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of
us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does
not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the
last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in
himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order
of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?.
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