I can in no wise imagine to myself the present condition of man as that which is designed to endure.  I cannot imagine it to be his whole and final destination.  If so, then would everything be dream and delusion, and it would not be worth the trouble to have lived and to have taken part in this ever-recurring, aimless, and unmeaning game.  Only so far as I can regard this condition as the means of something better, as a point of transition to a higher and more perfect, does it acquire any value for me.  Not on its own account, but on account of something better for which it prepares the way, can I bear it, honor it, and joyfully fulfil my part in it.  My mind can find no place, nor rest a moment, in the present; it is irresistibly repelled by it.  My whole life streams irrepressibly on toward the future and better.

Am I only to eat and to drink that I may hunger and thirst again, and again eat and drink, until the grave, yawning beneath my feet, swallows me up, and I myself spring up as food from the ground?  Am I to beget beings like myself, that they also may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves, who shall do the same that I have done?  To what purpose this circle which perpetually returns into itself; this game forever recommencing, after the same manner, in which everything is born but to perish, and perishes but to be born again as it was; this monster which forever devours itself that it may produce itself again, and which produces itself that it may again devour itself?

Never can this be the destination of my being and of all being.  There must be something which exists because it has been brought forth, and which now remains and can never be brought forth again after it has been brought forth once.  And this, that is permanent, must beget itself amid the mutations of the perishing, and continue amid those mutations, and be borne along unhurt upon the waves of time.

As yet our race wrings with difficulty its sustenance and its continuance from reluctant Nature.  As yet the larger portion of mankind are bowed down their whole life long by hard labor, to procure sustenance for themselves and the few who think for them.  Immortal spirits are compelled to fix all their thinking and scheming, and all their efforts, on the soil which bears them nourishment.  It often comes to pass as yet, that when the laborer has ended, and promises himself, for his pains, the continuance of his own existence and of those pains, then hostile elements destroy in a moment what he had been slowly and carefully preparing for years, and delivers up the industrious painstaking man, without any fault of his own, to hunger and misery.  It often comes to pass as yet, that inundations, storm-winds, volcanoes, desolate whole countries, and mingle works which bear the impress of a rational mind, as well as their authors, with the wild chaos of death and destruction.  Diseases still hurry men into a premature grave, men in the bloom of their powers, and children whose existence passes away without fruit or result.  The pestilence still stalks through blooming states, leaves the few who escape it bereaved and alone, deprived of the accustomed aid of their companions, and does all in its power to give back to the wilderness the land which the industry of man had already conquered for its own.