THE RELIGION OF NATURE 



Man " that I found any light at all. And after 

 these the works of all other writers seemed confus- 

 ing and futile. So, like Descartes, I abandoned 

 the reading of books and sought to find truth by 

 my own unaided speculations. 



Perhaps it was a natural consequence that, like 

 him, I should soon have arrived at that point of 

 knowledge whence the fundamental difference be- 

 tween man and other animals becomes plainly 

 manifest, although I reached it from an opposite 

 direction. 



For Descartes, with the ruthless accuracy of 

 his philosophic methods, came straight to the con- 

 clusion that man, by his conception of God, proves 

 himself to be the sole possessor of a rational soul 

 and that other animals are therefore mere autom- 

 ata: whereas I, with the advantage of the two- 

 and-a-half centuries of research which had cul- 

 minated in Darwin's great works, was laboriously 

 seeking for an explanation of the apparent cruelty 

 in nature, and made my way from fact to fact, 

 beginning from the very lowest forms of life, until 

 at last I, too, found myself in possession of the 

 great truth that, because man alone has, in his 

 likeness to God, a self-conscious soul, he alone 

 knows the meaning of unhappiness, which is a 

 spur to his development as the direct offspring 

 of God. 



[152] 



