Let us first endeavour to reply with sufficient precision to this question which comes within the province of our actual and visible life; for, if we are unable to do this, how can we hope to solve the other problem that stares every man in the face at the hour of death?
This sensitive point, in which the whole problem is summed up—for it is the only one in question; and, except in so far as it is concerned, immortality is certain—this mysterious point, to which, in the presence of death, we attach so high a value, we lose, strange to say, at any moment in life without feeling the least anxiety. Not only is it destroyed nightly in our sleep, but even in waking it is at the mercy of a host of accidents. A wound, a shock, an illness, a little alcohol, a little opium, a little smoke are enough to affect it. Even when nothing impairs it, it is not uniformly perceptible. An effort is often necessary, a deliberate looking into ourselves, before we can recover it and become aware of some particular event. At the least distraction, a joy passes by us without touching us, without giving up the pleasure which it contains. One would say that the functions of that organ by which we taste and know life are intermittent and that the presence of our ego, except in pain, is but a rapid and perpetual sequence of departures and returns. What reassures us is that we think ourselves certain to find it intact on awaking, after the wound, the shock or the distraction, whereas we are persuaded, so fragile do we feel it to be, that it is bound to disappear for ever in the awful impact between life and death.
One foremost truth, pending others which the future will no doubt reveal, is that, in these questions of life and death, our imagination has remained very childish. Almost every elsewhere, it is ahead of reason; but here it still loiters over the games of infancy. It surrounds itself with the barbaric dreams and longings wherewith it cradled the hopes and fears of cave-dwelling man. It asks for things that are impossible because they are too small. It clamours for privileges which, if obtained, were more to be dreaded than the most enormous disasters with which nihility threatens us. Can we think without shuddering of an eternity contained wholly within our paltry present-day consciousness? And behold how, in all this, we obey the illogical whims of fancy, which men in the olden time called _la folle du logis_. Which of us, if he were to go to sleep to-night in the scientific certainty of awaking in a hundred years exactly as he is to-day, with his body intact, even on condition that he lost all memory of his previous life—would such memories not be useless?—which of us would not welcome that age-long sleep with the same confidence as the brief, gentle slumbers of his every night? And yet between real death and this sleep there would be only the difference of that awakening deferred for a century, an awakening as alien to the sleeper as the birth of a posthumous child would be.