The spirit is insensible to all that is not happiness. It is made only for infinite joy, which is the joy of knowing and understanding. It can grieve only at perceiving its own limits; but to perceive those limits, when there are no more bonds to space and time, is already to transcend them.
It is now a question of knowing whether that spirit, sheltered from all sorrow, will remain itself, will perceive and recognize itself in the bosom of infinity; and up to what point it is important that it should recognize itself. This brings us to the problems of survival without consciousness, or survival with a consciousness different from that of to-day.
Survival without consciousness seems at first sight the more probable. From the point of view of the good or ill awaiting us on the other side of the grave, it amounts to annihilation. It is lawful, therefore, for those who prefer the easiest solution and that most consistent with the present state of human thought, to limit their anxiety to that. They have nothing to dread; for, on close inspection, every fear, if any remained, should deck itself with hopes. The body disintegrates and can no longer suffer; the mind, separated from the source of pleasure and pain, is extinguished, scattered and lost in a boundless darkness; and what comes is the great peace so often prayed for, the sleep without measure, without dreams and without awakening.
But this is only a solution that fosters indolence. If we press those who speak of survival without consciousness, we perceive that they mean only their present consciousness, for man conceives no other; and we have just seen that it is almost impossible for that manner of consciousness to persist in infinity.
Unless, indeed, they would deny every sort of consciousness, even that cosmic consciousness into which their own will fall. But this were to solve very quickly and very blindly, with a stroke of the sword in the night, the greatest and most mysterious question that can arise in a man’s brain.
It is evident that, in the depths of our thought limited on every side, we shall never be able to form the least idea of an infinite consciousness. There is even an essential antinomy between the words consciousness and infinity. To speak of consciousness is to mean the most definite thing conceivable in the finite; consciousness, properly speaking, is the finite huddled into itself in order to discover and feel its closest limits, to the end that it may enjoy them as closely as possible. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to separate the idea of intelligence from the idea of consciousness. Any intelligence that does not seem capable of transforming itself into consciousness becomes for us a mysterious phenomenon to which we give names more mysterious still, lest we should have to admit that we understand nothing of it at all. Now, on this little earth of ours, which is but a dot in space, we see expended in every scale of life (remember, for instance, the wonderful combinations and organisms of the insect world) a mass of intelligence so vast that our human intelligence cannot even dream of assessing it. Everything that exists—and man first of all—is incessantly drawing upon that inexhaustible reserve. We are therefore irresistibly driven to ask ourselves if that cosmic intelligence is not the emanation of an infinite consciousness, or if it must not, sooner or later, elaborate one. And this sets us tossing between two irreducible impossibilities. What is most probable is that here again we are judging everything from the lowlands of our anthropomorphism. At the summit of our infinitesimal life, we see only intelligence and consciousness, the extreme point of thought; and from this we infer that, at the summits of all lives, there could be naught but intelligence and consciousness, whereas these perhaps occupy only an inferior place in the hierarchy of spiritual or other possibilities.