We will not here discuss this doctrine of successive lives and of the expiatory and purifying reincarnation, which is the noblest and, up to now, the only acceptable explanation of nature’s injustices that has been discovered. In the present state of our knowledge, it can be only a magnificent theory or a statement impossible of proof. Let us not forsake the indisputable ground on which heredity and preexistence have their being. Heredity is an acquired fact, an experimental truth; preexistence is a logical necessity. It is not indeed possible to conceive that what will be born of us does not already exist within us in fact, in principle, in the germ, in essence or in potentiality; and, from the moment of its existence in a fashion probably more spiritual than material, it is far less surprising that it should be more or less responsible for thoughts and actions to which it could not be wholly a stranger. In any case, heredity, which is incontestable, and preexistence, which is necessary, remind us yet once again that each of us is not a single being, isolated, permanent, hermetically sealed, independent of others and separated from all things in time and space, but a porous vase dipping into the infinite; a sort of cross-roads, where all the paths of the past, the present and the future meet; an inn beside the eternal highways, where all the lives which make up our own foregather for a few days’ sojourn. We believe ourselves dead when they leave the inn; and we fancy that they too have perished. It is more likely that this is not so at all. They are merely quitting the ruined hostel to install themselves in a new and more habitable house. They carry with them their debts and their obligations; they remove to their new abode their instincts, their habits, their ideals, their passions also, their merits and their faults, their acquisitions and their memories. The house is different, but the guests are the same; and the old life will resume its course in the new dwelling and will be perhaps a little nobler, perhaps a little fairer, perhaps filled with a little brighter light. THE GREAT REVELATION XVI THE GREAT REVELATION 1 We despair of ever knowing the origin of the universe, its aim, its laws, or its intentions; and we end by doubting whether there be any. It were wiser very humbly to confess that we are not able to conceive them. It is probable that, if the universe to-morrow were to yield us the key of its riddle, we should be as incapable of understanding how to use it as is a dog to whom we show the key of a clock. In revealing its great secret to us, it would teach us hardly anything; or at least the revelation would have but an insignificant influence upon our life, our happiness, our ethics, our efforts, and our hopes. It would soar at such heights that no one would perceive it; at most it would disencumber the sky of our religious illusions, leaving only the infinite void of the ether in their place. 2