Let us now suppose that a miracle suddenly quicken his eyes and ears and reveal to him, through the open window by his bedside, the dawn rising over the plain, the song of the birds in the trees, the murmur of the wind among the leaves and of the water lapping its banks, the echoing of human voices among the morning hills. Let us suppose also that the same miracle, completing its work, restore the use of his limbs. He rises, stretches his arms to that prodigy which as yet for him possesses neither reality nor name: the light! He opens the door, staggers out amidst the effulgence; and his whole body is merged in the wonder of it all. He enters into an ineffable life, into a sky whereof no dream could have given him a foretaste; and, by a freak which is readily admissible in this sort of cure, health, introducing him to this inconceivable and unintelligible existence, wipes out in him all memory of days past. What will be the state of this ego, of this central focus, the receptacle of all our sensations, the spot in which converges all that belongs in its own right to our life, the supreme point, the “egotic” point of our being, if I may venture to coin a word? Memory being abolished, will that ego recover within itself a few traces of the man that was? A new force, the intellect, awaking and suddenly displaying unprecedented activity, what relation will that intellect keep up with the inert, dull germ whence it has sprung? Where, in his past, shall the man fix his moorings so that his identity may endure? And yet will there not survive within him some sense or instinct, independent of his memory, his intellect and I know not what other faculties, that will make him recognize that it is indeed in him that the liberating miracle has been wrought, that it is indeed his life and not his neighbour’s, transformed, irrecognizable, but substantially the same, that has issued from the silence and the darkness to prolong itself in harmony and light? Can we picture the disorder, the wandering hither and thither of that bewildered consciousness? Have we any idea in what manner the ego of yesterday will unite with the ego of to-day and how the “egotic” point, the only point which we are anxious to preserve intact, will behave in that delirium and that upheaval? Let us first endeavour to reply with sufficient precision to this question which comes within the province of our actual and visible life; for, if we are unable to do this, how can we hope to solve the other problem that stares every man in the face at the hour of death? 5