clay—if by so giving of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies behind, though we be not there to see it?
But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life. To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary
