As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present consciousness. But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense, the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case, it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question. It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes, yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no longer quite know what it is capable of doing. HOPE AND DESPAIR XIII HOPE AND DESPAIR 1 The same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me again: “I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words, to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self. Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of vacancy....” 2