.. "But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with
the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any
knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes
to each the same thing as though he had never lived.

"And then the consciousness itself--what is it during the time
that it continues? And what becomes of it when it ends? We can
only infer that it is a specialized and individualized form
of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcends both our
knowledge and our imagination; and that at death its elements
lapse into that Infinite and Eternal Energy whence they were
derived."

* * * * *

--_With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though
he had never lived?_ To the individual, perhaps--surely not to the
humanity made wiser and better by his labors.... But the world must
pass away: will it thereafter be the same for the universe as if
humanity had never existed? That might depend upon the possibilities
of future inter-planetary communication.... But the whole universe
of suns and planets must also perish: thereafter will it be the
same as if no intelligent life had ever toiled and suffered upon
those countless worlds? We have at least the certainty that the
energies of life cannot be destroyed, and the strong probability
that they will help to form another life and thought in universes
yet to be evolved.... Nevertheless, allowing for all imagined
possibilities,--granting even the likelihood of some inapprehensible
relation between all past and all future conditioned-being,--the
tremendous question remains: What signifies the whole of apparitional
existence to the Unconditioned? As flickers of sheet-lightning leave
no record in the night, so in that Darkness a million billion trillion
universes might come and go, and leave no trace of their having been.

* * * * *

To every aspect of the problem Herbert Spencer must have given
thought; but he has plainly declared that the human intellect, as at
present constituted, can offer no solution. The greatest mind that
this world has yet produced--the mind that systematized all human
knowledge, that revolutionized modern science, that dissipated
materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all
existence, that reestablished all ethics upon an immutable and eternal
foundation,--the mind that could expound