For the rest, I repeat, were it not for the absurd prominence given to our dead in the spiritualistic interpretation, this question of origin would have little importance, since both life and death are incessantly joining and uniting in all things. There are assuredly dead people in all these manifestations, seeing that we are full of dead people and that the greater part of ourselves is at this moment steeped in death, that is to say, is already living the boundless life that awaits us on the farther side of the grave. 8 We should be wrong, however, to fix all our attention on these extraordinary phenomena, either those with which we unduly connect the deceased or those no less striking ones in which we do not believe that they take part. They are evidently precious points of emergence that enable us approximately to mark the extent, the forms and the habits of our mystery. But it is within ourselves, in the silence of the darkness of our being, where it is ever in motion, guiding our destiny, that we should strive to surprise that mystery and to discover it. And I am not speaking only of the dreams, the presumptions, the vague intuitions, the room or less brilliant inspirations which are so many more manifestations, specific as it were and analogous with those that have occupied us. There is another, a more secret and much more active existence which we have scarcely begun to study and which is, if we descend to the bed-rock of truth, our only real existence. From the darkest corners of our ego it directs our veritable life, the one that is not to die, and pays no heed to our thought or to anything emanating from our reason, which believes that it guides nor steps. It alone knows the long past that preceded our birth and the endless future that will follow our departure from this earth. It is itself that future and that past, all those from whom we have sprung and all those who will spring from us. It represents the individual not only the species but that which preceded it and that which will follow it; and it has neither beginning nor end: that is why nothing touches it, nothing moves it which does not concern that which it represents. When a misfortune or a joy befall us, it knows their value instantly, knows if they are going to open or to dose the wells of life. It is the one thing that is never wrong. In vain does reason demonstrate to it, by irresistible arguments, that it is hopelessly at fault: silent under its immovable mask, whose expression we have not yet been able to react it pursues its way. It treats us as insignificant children, void of understanding, never answers our objections, refuses what we ask and lavishes upon us that which we refuse. If we go to the right, it reconducts us to the left. If we cultivate this or that faculty which we think that we possess or which we would like to possess, it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not wish for. It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs