and the more it diverges from Professor Metchnikoff’s assertion of its aims.  Salvation is indeed to lose one’s self.  But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if they were the antithesis of the religious life.  His book, when it is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is the ultimate of religion.

At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true solution round and about which his writing goes.  He suggests as his most hopeful satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-preservation will be at last extinct.  If that is not the very “resignation” he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is.  He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate.  We are to be glutted by living to six score and ten.  We are to rise from the table at last as gladly as we sat down.  We shall go to death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed.  Men are to have a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime, and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and twenty or thereabouts) and public service!

(But why, one asks, public service?  Why not book-collecting or the simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?  Metchnikoff never faces that question.  And again, what of the man who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty?  What does the prolongation of life do for him?  And where are the consolations for accidental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost limb?)

But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure religiosity.  The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-sacrifice as the fundamental “remedy.”  And indeed what other remedy has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?

“On the other hand,” he writes, “the knowledge that the goal of human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree of solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism.  The mere fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon (Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury.  Conviction that science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and to the solidarity of mankind.