of futurity, would draw a thin distinction:

"Others," he says, "rather than be lost in the uncomfortable
night of nothing, were content to recede into the common
being; and make one particle of the public soul of all things,
which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine
original again."

In effect this doctrine comes very near Maeterlinck's plea of comfort.
Annihilation, he says, is impossible, because nothing is destructible.
But when confronted with the eternal antinomy of death, that both the
end and the survival of personality are equally inconceivable, he
hesitates. He admits that survival without consciousness would be the
same as the annihilation o self (in which case he maintains death could
be no evil, bringing only eternal sleep). But he rejects this solution
as flattering only to ignorance, and has visions of a new ego collecting
a fresh nucleus round itself and developing in infinity. For the "narrow
ego" which we partly know--the humble self of memories and identity, the
soul that sums up experience into some kind of unity--he expresses
considerable contempt, as a frail and forgetful thing; and he seeks to
waft us away into an intellect devoid of senses, which he says almost
certainly exists, and into an infinity which is "nothing if it be not
felicity."

I do not know. A man may say what he pleases about intellect devoid of
senses, or about the felicity of infinity. One statement may be as true
as the other, or the reverse of both may be true. Talk of that kind
rests on no sounder basis than the old assertions about the houris and
the happy hunting-grounds, and it brings no surer consolation. Even when
Maeterlinck tells us that it is impossible for the universe to be a
mistake, and that our own reason necessarily corresponds with the
eternal laws of the universe, we may answer that we hope, and even
believe, that he is right, but on such a basis we can found no certainty
whatever. Nor does the self, when, warm with life, inspired with vital
passion, and energising for its own fulfilment, it stands horrified
before the gulf of death, fearing no conceivable torment, but only the
cessation of its power and identity--at such a moment that inward and
isolated self can derive no reassurance from the dim possibility of some
future nucleus, under cover of which it may pass into the felicity of
the universal infinite, stripped of its memory, its present personality,
and its flesh.