ays, 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 into the midst of the human
struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same
consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It
is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality,
he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our
individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal
individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction
between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative
spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative
individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be
somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this
splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall
arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our
life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea.
Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was
necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of
truth, and that in a