“I care not,” says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand nothing, “I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses: they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centres wherein lies the point which I feel to be my very self. They are thus set loose, floating in space and time; and their fate is as alien to me as that of the most distant stars. All that befalls has no existence for me unless I can recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and precisely nowhere and which I turn like a mirror about this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it.” 3 Thus our longing for immortality destroys itself while expressing itself, since it is on one of the accessory and most transient parts of our whole life that we base all the interest of our after-life. It seems to us that, if our existence be not continued with the greater part of its drawbacks, of the pettiness and blemishes that characterize it, nothing will distinguish it from that of other beings; that it will become a drop of ignorance in the ocean of the unknown; and that, thenceforth, all that may come to pass will no longer concern us. What immortality can one promise to men who almost necessarily conceive it in this guise? What is the use of it? asks a puerile but profound instinct. Any immortality that does not drag with it through eternity, like the fetters of the convict that we were, the strange consciousness formed during a few years of movement, any immortality that does not bear that indelible mark of our identity is for us as though it were not. Most of the religions have been well aware of this and have reckoned with that instinct which desires and at the same time destroys the after-life. It is thus that the Catholic Church, going back to the most primitive hopes, promises us not only the integral preservation of our earthly ego, but even the resurrection of our own flesh.