Human intelligence, in the course of its progressive evolution, has rebelled against these naïve palliatives. Finding the restoration of the much-desired harmony beyond its power, humanity became resigned to a passive fatalism, and believed even that the existence of man was a kind of bad joke, a _faux pas_ in the evolution of sentient organisms. Exact science, developing slowly, but surely, has at last tried to master the situation. Moving step by step, passing from the simple to the complex and from the particular to the general, science has established a set of truths which all the world must accept. Humanity in its misery has put question after question to science, and has lost patience at the slowness of the advance of knowledge. It has declared that the answers already found by science are futile and of little interest. From time to time it has preferred to turn back, and to delude itself with the beautiful mirages offered by religions and systems of philosophy. But science, confident of its methods, has quietly continued to work. Little by little, the answers to some of the questions that have been set have begun to appear. Whence do we come? science has been asked unceasingly. Is not man a being unlike other beings, made in the image of God, animated with the divine breath, and immortal? No, science answers. Man is a kind of miscarriage of an ape, endowed with profound intelligence and capable of great progress. His brain is the seat of processes that are very complex, and much higher than those of other animals, but these functions are incompatible with the existence of an immortal soul. Whither are we going? That question above all other things has absorbed the attention of man, and naturally so, for it is less important to know our origin than to know our destiny. Does death mean absolute extinction, or is it a gateway leading to a new and everlasting life? And if the latter alternative be untrue, how are we to face inevitable death? Science cannot admit the immortality of the conscious soul, for consciousness is a function of special elements in the body that certainly cannot live for ever. Immortality exists only for very low organisms that renew their lives by repeated divisions with complete regeneration, and that have no highly developed consciousness. Death brings absolute extinction, and it seems unbearable because of the condition in which it surprises us. It comes before man has finished his physiological development, and when the instinct of life is still strong.