resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them.  We might perhaps meet death with a desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented Earth.  But is it certain?

And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe, and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual consciousness—­yours, reader, mine—­be not eternal?

In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly—­a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon?  No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations.  The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything.  We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness.  And therefore God.  Such is His finality as we feel it.

What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting it and knowing it?  What would objectified reason be without will and feeling?  For us it would be equivalent to nothing—­a thousand times more dreadful than nothing.

If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and value.

It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God.  And to believe in God—­I must reiterate it yet again—­is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God may exist.  And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe.  For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe.

“The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God.”  And this is truth.  For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does not exist!  But only the wicked can say it in his heart.  Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him.