the Order in Things. The extent and duration of
matter, if they indicate any purpose at all, suggest one incomparably
vaster than this; while the laws of mind, which alone distinctly point
to purpose, reveal one in which pain and pleasure have no part or lot,
and one in which man has so small a share that it seems as if it must be
indifferent what his fate may be. The slightest change in the atmosphere
of the globe will sweep away his species forever.

Schopenhauer classified all religions as optimisms or pessimisms. The
faith of the future will be neither. What is agreeable or disagreeable
to man will not be its standard of the excellence of the universe.
However unwillingly, he is at last brought to confess that his comfort
is not the chief nor even any visible aim of the order in things. In the
course of that order it may be, nay, it is nigh certain, that the human
species will pass through decadence to extinction along with so many
other organisms. Neither as individuals nor as a race, neither in regard
to this life nor to the next, does the idea of God, when ennobled by a
contemplation of the cosmical relations, permit to man the effrontery
of claiming that this universe and all that therein is was made with an
eye to his wants and wishes, whether to gratify or to defeat them.

(3.) The closer defining of life as a result of physical force, and the
recognition of mind as a connotation of organism, promise to be active
in elevating religious conceptions, but at the expense of the current
notions of personality. Sensation and voluntary motion are common to the
fetus, the brute and the plant, as well as to man. They are not part of
his "soul." Intellect and consciousness, as I have shown, exclude
sensation, and in these, if anywhere, he must look for his immortal
part. Even here, error works destruction, and ignorance plants no seed
of life. We are driven back to the teaching of Buddha, that true thought
alone is that which does not die.

Why should we ask more? What else is worth saving? Our present
personality is a train of ideas base and noble, true and false, coherent
through the contiguity of organs nourished from a common center. Another
personality is possible, one of true ideas coherent through conscious
similarity, independent of sensation, as dealing with topics not
commensurate with it. Yet were this refuge gained, it leaves not much of
the dogma that every man has an indestructible conscious soul, which