t
of those of Buechner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work
with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with
not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that
there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in
it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as
contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who,
though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are
unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the
most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of
despair, we will speak later on.

And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are
bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and
consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time,
at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all
human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for
living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing
products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of
its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to
veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and
disconsolatory power.

Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of
manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and
beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those
who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all
this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?
Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science,
of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these
beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions
of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist
to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth,
beauty, justice, and all the rest?

Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less
rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the
Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and
to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves
unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living,
even though the human consciousness