Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a farthing for these things, and this indifference “in a matter that touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me,” and he who feels thus “is for me,” as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, “a monster.”

It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead.  And from what does he thus guard them?  From what does he so futilely protect them?  The wretched consciousness shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself.  And so the earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead themselves should die again.

When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses.  It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the permanent habitations.

This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves religions.  In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and “the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul,” the Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to turn to corruption.

A disease?  Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially diseased.  A disease?  Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this disease is the fount of all vigorous health.  From the depth of this anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to behold the stars once again—­

    e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of anguish, it fortifies us in the end.  Retire, reader, into yourself and imagine a slow dissolution of yourself—­the light dimming about you—­all things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence—­the objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands—­the ground slipping from under your feet—­your very memory vanishing as if in a swoon—­everything melting away from you into nothingness and you yourself also melting away—­the very consciousness of nothingness, merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.