IMPOSSIBILITY OF ADAPTATION. IO3 



of the functions of life is the aim of life, life is a fail- 

 ure, for all its forms must die and pass away. 



§ 6. Nor is there adaptation to the social en- 

 vironment : births, marriages, and deaths ring the 

 changes of our social happiness. How can there be 

 stability in relations where all the acting forces come 

 and go, are attracted and divorced by influences 

 they can neither calculate nor govern ? To set 

 one's heart upon the fortunes of another does but 

 multiply the sources of its deadly hurt, and the more 

 expose our vitals to the shafts of fortune. For in 

 the end all love is loss, and all affection breeds 

 affliction. What does it then avail to vow in vain 

 a faith that fate frustrates? why should our will 

 weave ties that death and chance must shatter ? 



Does not true wisdom, then, lie in a self-centred 

 absorption in one's own interests ? Is not a cool 

 and calm selfishness, which does not place its happi- 

 ness in aught beyond its self, which engages in social 

 relations but does not engage z^se// in them, the 

 primary condition of prosperity ? Does not the 

 sage's soul retire into its own sphere and contemplate 

 its own intrinsic radiance, unbroken, untouched and 

 unobscured by sympathetic shadows from the lives 

 of others ? Is not feeling with others in very truth 

 sympathy, suffering with them ? 



§ 7. The dream of such a self-sufficing severance 

 from all physical and social ties may be an ideal for 

 fakirs, but it is impossible for men. And even were 

 it possible, happiness would be as little found in the 

 individual soul as in the social life. 



For here too, harmony is unattainable : the dis- 

 cords of the essential elements of our nature can 

 never be composed by beings subjected to the 

 material world of Time and Space. It is impossible 



