What is so short an interval, compared to the general duration of time, to the age of the earth and of the worlds? It is one minute in eternity. Our brief life is not, cannot be anything but an accident, a rapid and passing phenomenon, which hardly counts for anything in the history of nature. On the other hand, the physical conditions of terrestrial life are detestable. Man is a martyr, exposed to every sort of suffering: owing partly to the defective organization of his body, incessantly menaced with danger from external causes, dreading the extremes of heat and cold; weak and ailing, coming into the world naked, and without any natural defence against the influence of climate. If, in one portion of Europe, and in America, the progress of civilization has secured comfort for the rich, what are the sufferings of the poor in those very same countries? Life is perpetual suffering to the greater number of the men who inhabit the insalubrious regions of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. And then, before there was any civilization at all, during the period of Primitive Man, a period so immense that it stretches back to a hundred thousand years before our epoch, what was the fate of humanity? It was a perpetual succession of suffering, danger, and pain. The conditions of human existence are as evil from the moral as from the physical point of view. It is granted that here below happiness is impossible. The Holy Scriptures, when they tell us that the earth is a valley of tears, do but render an incontestable truth in a poetic form. Yes, man has no destiny here but suffering. He suffers in his affections, and in his unfulfilled desires, in the aspirations and impulses of his soul, continually thrust back, baffled, beaten down by insurmountable obstacles and resistance. Happiness is a forbidden condition. The few agreeable sensations which we experience, now and then, are expiated by the bitterest grief. We have affections, that we may lose and mourn their dearest objects; we have fathers, mothers, children, that we may see them die. It is impossible that a state so abnormal can be a definitive condition. Order, harmony, equilibrium reign throughout the physical world, and it must be that the same are to be found again in the moral world. If, on looking around us, we are forced to acknowledge that suffering is the common and constant rule, that injustice and violence dominate, that force triumphs, that victims tremble and die under the iron hand of cruelty and oppression; then it must be that this is only a temporary order of things. It cannot be otherwise than a moment of transition, an intermediary period which Providence condemns us to pass through rapidly, on our way to a better state. But, what is this new condition, what is this second existence which is to succeed to our terrestrial life? In other words, what becomes of the human soul after death has broken the bonds which held it to the body? This is what we have to investigate.