growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome
of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no
intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual life beyond
the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined
to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the
whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath
the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things if not quite
beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which
rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the
soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 60-61
("The Free Man's Worship").]

Such a prospect to the serious-minded and sensitive-spirited
cannot but provoke the profoundest melancholy. There is,
even for the most healthy-minded of us, sufficient ground for
pessimism, bitterness, insecurity. Even if we personally--largely
through the accidents of circumstance--happen to
be successful, "our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker
of any rogue at his success." The utter futility and evanescence
of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed
at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so
patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and
death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a
thoroughgoing philosophy of life:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is
vanity.

What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the
sun?...

All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and
to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to
him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good so
is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath....

For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of
them is forgotten.

Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is
done under the sun.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Ecclesiastes_.]

Religion offers solace to those perturbed and passionate
souls, among others, to whom these fut