“Suppose that, to snatch you from some intolerable suffering, you were promised an awakening and a return to consciousness after a wholly unconscious sleep of three months?” “‘I would accept it gladly.’ “But suppose that, at the end of the three months, they forgot you and did not wake you until ten thousand years had passed, how much the wiser would you be? And, sleep once begun, what difference does it make to you whether it last for three months or for ever?” 7 Let us then consider that all that composes our consciousness comes first of all from our body. Our mind does but organize that which is supplied by our senses; and even the images and the words—which in reality are but images—by the aid of which it strives to sever itself from those senses and deny their sway are borrowed from them. How could that mind remain what it was, when it has nothing left of that which formed it? When our mind no longer has a body, what shall it carry with it into infinity whereby to recognize itself, seeing that it knows itself only by favour of that body? A few memories of their common life? Will those memories, which were already fading in this world, suffice to separate it for ever from the rest of the universe, in boundless space and in unlimited time? “But,” I shall be told, “there is more in us than our intelligence discovers. We have many things within us which our senses have not placed there; we contain a greater being than the one we know.” That is probable, nay, certain: the share occupied by the inconscient, that is to say, by that which represents the universe, is enormous and preponderant. But how shall the ego which we know and whose destiny alone concerns us recognize all those things and that greater being neither of which it has ever known? What will it do in the presence of that stranger? If I be told that the stranger is myself, I will readily agree; but was that which upon earth felt and weighed my joys and sorrows and gave birth to the few memories and thoughts that remain to me, was that this impassive, unseen stranger who existed in me all unsuspected, even as I am probably about to live in him without his concerning himself with a presence that will bring him but the sorry recollection of a thing that has ceased to be? Now that he has taken my place, while destroying, in order to acquire a larger consciousness, all that formed my small consciousness here below, is it not another life commencing, a life whose joys and sorrows will pass above my head, not even brushing with their new-born wings the being which I am conscious of to-day? 8