heir final
condition, they will perhaps deserve commiseration, but they will hardly
deserve castigation, for their attitude is one which will bring its own
castigation with it. I can only hope that I am entitled to the truly
charitable satisfaction of regarding them as a class to which I do not
myself belong, and that the literary industry of a life otherwise idle
may prove to be a form of action, or rather a reaction, which, alike as
to religion and politics, will have not been unserviceable to the world.

To sum the matter up, the Lucretian philosophy of life, appealing as it
may to men when in certain moods, is one which, when submitted to what
Kant calls the "practical reason," shrivels up into an absurdity, and I
have shown at length, in my work _The Reconstruction of Belief_, that
this becomes only the more apparent when we consider the attempts which
have been made by modern thinkers to vivify it by an idea of which in
Lucretius there is no trace. Put into language less imposing than his
own, the gospel of Lucretius virtually comes to this, that men may eat
and drink and propagate their kind in comfort if only they will hold
fast to the belief that men, when they die, slip into their burrows like
rabbits, and will, though they have done with pleasure, be out of the
reach of pain--that whatever they may have done or not done, they will
all, as individuals, be as though they never had been. The only
enlargement of this gospel which modern thought can suggest is rooted in
a transference of men's serious interests in life from the life of the
individual to the life of the community or the race, and in the thought
that, though the individual perishes, the race will continue and
progress.

The answer given to this argument in _The Reconstruction of Belief_ is
that, even if we suppose such corporate progress to be a reality, it
cannot be invested with any practical meaning unless we postulate the
individual, and consider his fortunes first. We have here the Asses'
Bridge of all philosophy whatsoever, and until the philosopher has
crossed it the philosopher can do nothing but bray. The whole external
universe, the race of men included, has for no man any perceptible
existence except in so far as it is reflected in the thoughts and the
sensations of the individual. The conception of the race is nothing, so
far as we can know it, beyond what the individual conceives. Let us
suppose it, then, to be in some relative sense t