"The greater number of souls never even suspect their own existence. Out
of the fourteen hundred millions of human beings who people the earth,
ninety-nine one hundredths do not think. Great heavens! what would they
do with immortality? As the molecule of iron floats in the blood,
throbbing in Lamartine's or Hugo's temple, or is fixed for a time in
Cæsar's sword; as the molecule of hydrogen shines in the lobby of a
theatre, or merges itself into the drop of water swallowed by a fish in
the dusky depths of the sea, so living atoms sleep which have never
thought. Thinking souls are the inheritance of the intellectual life.
They preserve humanity's patrimony, and increase it for the future.
Without this immortality of human souls which are conscious of their
existence and live through the mind, all the history of the earth would
end in nothing, and the whole creation, that of the most sublime worlds
as well as that of our mean little planet, would be a deceptive
absurdity, more miserable and pitiable than the cast of an earthworm.
That has a right to be; but the universe would not have. Do you imagine
that the thousand millions of worlds attain the splendors of life and
thought, to succeed each other without end in the sidereal universe,
only to give birth to constantly deceived hopes, and grandeurs which are
perpetually destroyed? It is useless for us to humble ourselves; we
cannot admit that nothing is the supreme object of perpetual progress,
proved by all the history of Nature. Now, souls are the seeds of
planetary humanities."
"Can they transport themselves from one world to another?"
[Illustration]