What will be our fate in that infinity? We are asking ourselves no idle question, even if we should unite with it after losing all consciousness, all notion of the ego, even if we should exist there as no more than a little nameless substance—soul or matter, we cannot tell—suspended in the equally nameless abyss that replaces time and space. It is not an idle question, for it concerns the history of the worlds or of the universe; and this history, far more than that of our petty existence, is our own great history, in which perhaps something of ourselves or something incomparably better and vaster will end by meeting us again some day. 3 Shall we be unhappy there? It is hardly reassuring when we consider the ways of nature and remember that we form part of a universe that has not yet gathered its wisdom. We have seen, it is true, that good and bad fortune exist only in so far as regards our body and that, when we have lost the organ of suffering, we shall not meet any of the earthly sorrows again. But our anxiety does not end here; and will not our mind, lingering upon our erstwhile sorrows, drifting derelict from world to world, unknown to itself in an unknowable that seeks itself hopelessly, will not our mind know here the frightful torture of which we have already spoken and which is doubtless the last that imagination can touch with its wing? Finally, if there were nothing left of our body and our mind, there would still remain the matter and the spirit (or, at least, the obviously single force to which we give that double name) which composed them and whose fate must be no more indifferent to us than our own fate; for, let us repeat, from our death onwards, the adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure. Let us not, therefore, say to ourselves: “What can it matter? We shall not be there.” We shall be there always, because everything will be there. 4