A thousand voices exclaim, like Montaigne and Charron, that the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by sheer force of reasoning. In any case, how long we have to wait! cries Margaret of France. For how many centuries have some who have fallen asleep looked for their awakening! The Middle Ages replied to this question with their own terrible logic. They set us on the edge of the abyss, and there told us that in this world there is no happiness, but merely consolations; they linked us with a supreme life lying beyond us, like those hard, emaciated, immovable statues incorporate with the stone of cathedrals and themselves of the same stone. We live, they told us, with another life than our own, and love with another love; if we lose one dear to us we may cast flowers on the vacant chair or the needless cradle, altars of true life! Platonism prefers to take us for what we are. Not supposing that Providence sets man upon the earth to struggle against its own blessings, the platonists believed that in making religion more lovable they would make the world less pagan, and that in giving it a philosophical cast they would make it acceptable to unbelievers. Love seemed to them to be a reservoir of life, like those noble springs which leap down in some shady nook of a park, and flow on through a network of arteries more or less conspicuous, to give life even to the desert. Soon we shall no longer be; the hours of our life are sacred: what is the good of ruffling them with so many disquietudes? It is a law of our life to yearn for Paradise, and there is nothing to hinder us desiring it in this present world.