Without having died, I am a ghost.
Other men are dreams to me, and I am a dream to them.
_Later_--Consciousness in me takes no account of the category of time,
and therefore all the partitions which tend to make of life a palace
with a thousand rooms, do not exist in my case; I am still in the
primitive unicellular state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego,
and I feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance which
they have individualized. All the endowment of animality is, so to
speak, repudiated; all the produce of study and of cultivation is in the
same way annulled; the whole crystallization is redissolved into fluid;
the whole rainbow is withdrawn within the dewdrop; consequences return
to the principle, effects to the cause, the bird to the egg, the
organism to its germ.
This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it
represents the life beyond the grave, the return to school, the soul
fading into the world of ghosts, or descending into the region of _Die
Muetter_; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing
all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only
in the indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of
pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? Is not
mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development, past
or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its
algebraical formula.
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