168 THE GREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



found it, is this wonderful quintessence, the inmost 

 nerve and life of Philosophy, of Art, as well as of Science 

 herself, to be thus finally wasted ? Is Nature so blind 

 and stupid, as well as so foolishly wasteful of her 

 gathered gains, as to throw away the grandest thing 

 the only really great thing she had reached, and to 

 throw it away just when she had perfected it? The 

 thing, moreover, to attain to which it seems that all her 

 efforts were bent, and towards which all her labours in 

 all directions finally converged ? And is it credible, or 

 even thinkable, that all thought and consciousness 

 should finally perish out of the universe ? for to this 

 length the scientific argument really goes, maintaining, 

 as it does, that not merely my individual consciousness, 

 and all others resembling mine, must cease, but that the 

 human species itse]f must perish in process of time, 

 together with the earth, the sun, our system, and finally 

 all the systems of the universe. Is it thinkable that all 

 consciousness should perish, and that eternal night and 

 nothingness should set in ? that the universe should 

 return once again to the cosmic vapour and the eternal 

 silence from which it first proceeded ? For this is the 

 alternative ; since science has not made the provision of 

 philosophy or religion for the preservation of mind by 

 the postulate of an Eternal Spirit, or, at least, of a great 

 universal mind different from all individual ones. We 

 might have become reconciled to the belief, however 

 insufficient the evidence for it "appears to be, that the 

 earth, the sun, nay, even all the spheres of space, should 

 die ; we might have even accepted the extinction of our 

 hopes of individual immortality ; but when we find that 

 the same argument which destroys all these and our- 

 selves brings us in the end to a universe of death, we 

 must conclude there is a vice in the reasoning which 



