categorical tone, is really what often lends his life some propriety and
spirit. Business and war and any customary task may come to form, so to
speak, an organ whose natural function will be just that operation, and
the most abstract and secondary activity, like that of adding figures or
reading advertisements, may in this way become the one function proper
to some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice underground and
happy pedants in the upper air.

Facts are not wanting for these pillars of society to take solace in, if
they wish to defend their philosophy. The time will come, astronomers
say, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights
of sense and imagination will be over. It is these that will have turned
out to be vain. But the masses of matter which the worldlings have
transformed with their machinery, and carried from one place to another,
will remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms will
never be what it would have been if their feet had less continually
beaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of knowing that,
when nothing that the spirit values endures, the earth may still
sometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across the
moon's craters.

[Sidenote: Two supposed escapes from vanity:]

There is no more critical moment in the life of a man and a nation than
that in which they are first conscience-stricken and convicted of
vanity. Failure, exhaustion, confusion of aims, or whatever else it be
that causes a revulsion, brings them before a serious dilemma. Has the
vanity of life hitherto been essential or incidental? Are we to look for
a new ambition, free from all the illusions of natural impulse, or are
we rather to renounce all will indiscriminately and fall back upon
conformity and consummate indifference? As this question is answered in
one way or the other, two different types of unworldly religion arise.

[Sidenote: fanaticism.]

The first, which heralds a new and unimpeachable special hope, a highest
duty finally recognised and driving out all lesser motives and
satisfactions from the soul, refers vanity to perversity, to error, to a
sort of original misunderstanding of our own nature which has led us, in
pursuing our worldly interests, to pursue in truth our own destruction.
The vanity of life, according to this belief, has been accidental. The
taint of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misled
us