WHA T LIES BE YOND ! 391 



of life renews itself, while the mould or form remains." You 

 may even affirm, without appearing too adventurous, that the 

 innumerable whirling globules which enter into the composi- 

 tion of the human blood are so many microscopical individuals, 

 each with its own proper life, infinitesimal forms which are 

 born, and move to and fro, and disappear, and are renewed, 

 without the individual whose aggregate they perform having 

 any consciousness of all this activity. 



Thus it is that the collective integral being which we call 

 humanity, lives and is developed through the removal of the 

 individuals composing it, ephemeral creatures, each of whom 

 thinks himself a god ! 



Must we stop there ? That would be to declare humanity 

 the last term of a progression whose commencement and 

 end, according to our own acknowledgment, completely 

 escape us : it would be at once a contradiction and a flagrant 

 violation of the great law of infinite continuity which reigns 

 everywhere. 



To suppose that beyond humanity there is only nothingness, 

 would be to enunciate an hypothesis as puerile as that which 

 pretended the earth was not only the centre of our system, 

 but the sole inhabited or inhabitable point in the immensity 

 of space, and that the stars of the firmament were created for 

 the service and pleasure of mortals. Suppose that this absurd 

 belief were true ; of what use, I ask you, would be all our 

 agitations, all our flutterings, all our conceptions, all our 

 conquests, all our glories, all our memories, when the end of 



