these unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness.  And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence.  That distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to exist.  And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn heavens.  Unhappy heavens!

And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all.

If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able to look—­that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression—­you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more:  at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.  And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love.

In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything.  For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes.  We only pity—­that is to say, we only love—­that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves.  Or, rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals these resemblances to us.  If I am moved to pity and love the luckless star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim, which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that is doomed one day to cease to be.  For all consciousness is consciousness of death and of suffering.

Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion.  Love personalizes all that it loves.  Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.  And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness.  And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.  And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.