SOUNDINGS 



Each of us is an incarnation of the universal 

 mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and 

 every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps 

 and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an 

 end in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for, 

 is to betray our tradesman habit of mind. Man is a 

 link in an endless chain of being. If we ask what he 

 is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good as 

 any — "To glorify God and enjoy Him forever." In 

 other words, to make the most of his life and strive 

 for the highest happiness, which is knowledge and 

 appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we 

 glorify God when we work for the well-being of 

 mankind. 



How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our 

 minds to the thought of death — to the thought of 

 the absolute negation of life ! When we torment our- 

 selves about death, about the coldness and darkness 

 of the grave, about being cut off from all the warm 

 and happy currents of life that flow about us, we are 

 unconsciously thinking of ourselves as still living, or 

 as conscious of the gloom and negation that await 

 us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John 

 Morley) that the thought of extinction disturbed 

 him more and more as he neared the end of life, he 

 fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. "It 

 flashes across me," he writes, "at all sorts of times 

 with a sort of horror that in 1903 I shall probably 

 know no more of what is going on than I did in 



