There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation as something collective.  As something collective also, merit, and as something collective sin, and redemption.  According to this mode of feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour’s Christ.

And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead?  This sense of the transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in popular Catholic piety.

Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man’s religious thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan derivation—­for such were the heroes and demi-gods—­which sometimes shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are called and few that are chosen.

Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands the third edition of the Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort, by Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive expression.  The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real existence—­strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor die.  Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no one can say “I am” but only “we are,” or, more correctly, “there is in us.”  It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us.  And souls are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted.  “The living thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman.”  Each of us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does not know it.  “If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?...  As we are all bound together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the fruits of our travail.”  According to this mode of imagining and thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished its struggle but many times has been plunged