suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits in space—­which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the concrete eternity in time—­then it will follow that this system of ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite number of lives, all exactly identical.  A jest, as you see, but one not less comic—­that is to say, not less tragic—­than that of Nietzsche, that of the laughing lion.  And why does the lion laugh?  I think he laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be the same lion again.

But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart, feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality.  The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.

Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the impenetrable.  But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think.  A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the object of desire—­nihil volitum quin praecognitum, there can be no volition save of things already known.  But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it.  And of this sort of blindness from birth there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange aberration.  For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration.

More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say:  “We must not talk about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may.”  But this sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity.  May it perhaps be that by saying “We must not talk about it,” they succeed in not thinking about it?  Our will is weakened?  And what then?  We lose the capacity for human action?  And what then?  It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about it.

    Meglio oprando obliar, senza indagarlo,
    Questo enorme mister del universo!