It is true that there are people who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us not to seek to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in eternal personal life in order to find incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing can be willed that is not previously known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or at some other point of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And this kind of blindness from birth is scarcely possible among men, except by a strange aberration. And the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration. I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed once again the bankruptcy of science. For science, in so far as it is a substitute for religion, and reason, in so far as it is a substitute for faith, have always foundered. Science will be able to satisfy in an increasing measure, and in fact does satisfy, our increasing logical and intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, our hunger for immortality--far from satisfying it, it contradicts it. Rational life and truth stand in opposition to one another. And can it be that there is any other truth than rational truth? It must remain established, therefore, that reason, human reason, within its limits not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal and that the human consciousness is through all the ages indestructible, but that it proves rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what we know by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which is all the same whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum est, quia impossible est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute incertitude. * * * * *