SEXUAL PLETHORA AND DEATH
obliged, to believe in the immortality of his separate existence. He looks upon his "soul", his discontinuity, as the deepest truth of his own being, for he is taken in by the survival of his physical being although this may be only partial and its constituent parts may decompose. Since bones are so durable he has even invented the "resurrection of the body". On the day of judgment the bones are to come together and the resuscitated bodies bring the soul back to its original state. Here is an exaggeration of a physical condition in which continuity, no less fundamental in sexual reproduction, is lost: the genetic cells divide and from one to another it is possible to have an objective understanding of the initial unity. Continuity underlying each scissiparous division is always obvious. On the level of the discontinuity and the continuity of beings the only new element in sexual reproduction is the fusion of the two. minute entities, tiny cells, the male and female gametes. But the fusion makes the fundamental continuity finally plain; it shows that lost continuity can be found again. The discontinuousness of sexual beings gives rise to a dense and heavy world where individual separateness has terrifying foundations; the anguish of death and pain has bestowed on this wall of separation the solidity of prison walls, dismal and hostile. Yet within this unhappy world lost continuity can be found again if fertilisation takes place: fertilisation, fusion, that is, would be unthinkable if the apparent discontinuousness of the simplest animated beings were not an illusion. Only the discontinuousness of complex creatures seems intangible to begin with. We do not seem able to conceive of their discontinuity being reduced to a single unity or of being doubled (or called in question). The moments of plethora when animals are in the grip of sexual fever are critical ones in their isolation. Then fear of death and pain is transcended, then the sense of relative continuity between animals of the same species, always there in the background as a contradiction, though not a serious one, of apparent