It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes our imagination sees there are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvellous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and rebirth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some ineffable event. CHAPTER XII CONCLUSIONS 1 In order to retain a livelier image of all this and a more exact memory, let us give a last glance at the road which we have travelled. We have put aside, for reasons which we have stated, the religious solutions and total annihilation. Annihilation is physically impossible; the religious solutions occupy a citadel without doors or windows into which human reason does not penetrate. Next comes the hypothesis of the survival of our ego, released from its body, but retaining a full and unimpaired consciousness of its identity. We have seen that this hypothesis, strictly defined, has very little likelihood and is not greatly to be desired, although, with the surrender of the body, the source of all our ills, it seems less to be feared than our actual existence. On the other hand, as soon as we try to extend or to exalt it, so that it may appear less barbarous or less crude, we come back to the hypothesis of a cosmic consciousness or of a modified consciousness, which, together with that of survival without any sort of consciousness, closes the field to every supposition and exhausts every forecast of the imagination. Survival without any sort of consciousness would be tantamount for us to annihilation pure and simple and consequently would be no more dreadful than the latter, that is to say, than a sleep with no dreams and with no awakening. The hypothesis is unquestionably more acceptable than that of annihilation; but it prejudges very rashly the questions of a cosmic consciousness and of a modified consciousness. 2