Death is the end of us, and therefore
self-consciousness is a mistake. The animals without it are happier
and better than we. How terrible it is to think that a man like me
who has developed steadily throughout my whole life should now face
the blank wall of annihilation just when my mind is at its best,
when my senses are most keen to profit by the richness and wonder of
life! The thought that individual development is thus meaningless is
so repugnant not merely to his heart's desire but to his mental
sense of the fitness of things, that it has sometimes seemed as if
there must be a future life where the soul can pursue its natural
course ahead. But he dismisses this thought as impossible; for if
there were a future life, I should be the first to know of it. It
would certainly have been revealed to a splendid mind like mine. It
is the mountain peak that catches the first flush of the dawn, not
the valley: it is the topmost branch of the great tree that gets the
first whisper of the coming breeze.
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