Mental disease confirms this conclusion, and it, too, gives no ground for the belief in a survival of the mind after death. Certain internal sensibilities in the depths of our organism survive our personal consciousness. When the heart has ceased to beat, and when the anæmic brain is certainly incapable of personal consciousness, some portions of the body may still retain vitality. The muscular fibres are still able to contract when they are stimulated, and the white corpuscles of the blood can still exhibit their specific movements. It is certain, moreover, that these white corpuscles possess a specific sensibility, and, by a sort of sense of taste, respond to the kind of environment that surrounds them. Our consciousness, however, is absolutely out of touch with the sensations of these globules, which, however, none the less are part of our organism. It happens, therefore, that in certain diseases, the white corpuscles, stimulated by the presence of particular substances, perform extensive movements of migration within our bodies. Such migration is quite outside the sphere of consciousness. The corpuscles, directed by their sensibility, are in constant pursuit of microbes that have entered the body, and yet these actions, too, are not made known to our consciousness. In the same fashion, the thousands of active spermatozoa in the male organs and the ova in the female possess specific sensibility. These reproductive elements contain the germ of individual consciousness, but it is not until they have developed into the new generation that it is possible to impute to them individual consciousness, and the organism that shelters them has no idea of what it harbours. The sensibility of the white corpuscles and of the many other cells composing our body, although certainly a reality, has no part in the absolutely special sensation that we call individual consciousness, and which is all we think of in wishing to escape death. The idea of a future life is supported by not a single fact, while there is much evidence against it. The phenomenon of intercommunication across a distance, sometimes called telepathy, may be actual, but affords no support to the conception of the existence of souls apart from bodies. It may be that emanations are given off by certain organs, and that these are capable of being appreciated by the organs of another body at a distance; but, even if such were the case, we should have to deal simply with other bodily functions. Moreover, the supposed phenomena that fall within this category are so rare, so difficult to observe, and so obscure, that no certain argument for the continuance of existence after death can be deduced from them. It is easy to see why the advance of knowledge has diminished the number of believers in the persistence of consciousness after death, and that complete annihilation at death is the conception accepted by the vast majority of enlightened persons.