It is well sometimes to tell ourselves that we are at least living in a world which has not yet exhausted its future and which is much nearer to its beginning than to its end. It was born only yesterday and has but lately disentangled its original chaos. It is at the starting-point of its hopes and its experiments. We believe that it is making for death, whereas all its past, on the contrary, shows that it is much more probably making for life. In any case, as its years pass by, the quantity and still more the quality of the life which it engenders and maintains tend to increase and to improve. It has given us only the first-fruits of its miracles; and in all likelihood there is no more connection between what it was and what it is than there will be between what it is and what it will be. No doubt, when its greatest marvels burst into being, we shall no longer possess the lives which we possess to-day; but we shall still be there under another form, we shall still be existing somewhere, on its surface or in its depths; and it is not utterly improbable that one of its last prodigies will reach us in our dust, awaken us and recall us to life, in order to impart to us at last the share of happiness which we had not enjoyed and to teach us that we were wrong not to interest ourselves, on the further side of our graves, in the destiny of this earth of ours, of which we had never ceased to be the immortal offspring. THE TWO LOBES XII THE TWO LOBES 1 A soldier writes me the following letter from the front: “There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught, in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that paradise of unripe fruits....