Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us?  Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions of centuries—­it matters not which—­no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?

Many and very various have been the rationalist devices—­more or less rational—­by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear.

The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatian carpe diem, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” does not differ in its essence from the Stoic attitude with its “Accomplish what the moral conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be.”  Both attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same as duty for duty’s sake.

Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists—­I mean of those who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite future time—­and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the fifth and last part of his Ethic to elucidating the path that leads to liberty and to determining the concept of happiness.  The concept!  Concept, not feeling!  For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist, happiness (beatitudo) is a concept, and the love of God an intellectual love.  After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth part that “the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body”—­which is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul—­he goes on to affirm in proposition xxiii. that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal,” and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking.  But do not let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual mind.  Everything is sub aeternitatis specie—­that is to say, pure illusion.  Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing more anti-vital than