piness he seeks is unattainable: (1) for as all beings strive after worldly advantages, the gain of one is the loss of others; and it is most probable that each individual will incur much superfluous suffering in the course of his vain efforts to seize unattainable blessing; (2) because even if a man gets worldly advantages, the more he obtains the less they satisfy him, and the more he hankers after fresh ones; (3) and chiefly because the longer a man lives, the more inevitable becomes the approach of old age, sickness, and of death, destroying all possibility of worldly advantages.
So that if man considers his life his own, to be spent in seeking worldly happiness for himself as well as for others, then that life can have no rational explanation for him. Life has a rational meaning only when one understands that to consider our life our own, or to see its aim in worldly happiness for ourselves or for other people——is a delusion; that a man's life does not belong to him who has received it, but to Him who has given it, and therefore its object should be not the attainment of worldly happiness either for one's self or for
