In the presence of the death of our friends no doubt this is a cheerless and depressing kind of philosophy, but in the pursuit of truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life. We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.” The laws of life and death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good. I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos. XIV SOUNDINGS I. THE GREAT MYSTERY No man in his senses can fail to grant the reality of the Great Mystery, the inscrutable and unspeakable Something which lies back of us and works in and through us, the vast Cosmic Energy of which we and all forms of life are manifestations, and in which we live and move and have our being, call it physical energy or psychic power, or what you will. We are not here by our wills; we do not have our eyes and ears, and the other wonderful mechanisms of our bodies, and all our varied instincts and capacities and aspirations of our own will and invention. We have little or nothing to do with the functioning of our various bodily organs, scarcely more than we have to do with the color of our eyes, our innate dispositions, and our mental aptitudes. In something not of us, at least not subject to our wills and wishes, is to be sought the explanation of our appearance, and that of all other forms of life, in this world. In other words, we are an integral part of a system of things which transcends our powers and baffles our understanding. After we have granted all this, can we still feel the solid ground beneath our feet in accepting the explanation and interpretation which any of the formal religious systems, old or new, place upon it? I think not. In the presence of the midnight skies, of the creative and destructive cosmic processes constantly going on in the awful depths of the sidereal space, of suns and systems coming in and going out like blooming and fading flowers, in the presence of the geological and biological histories of the globe, or of the histories of the different nations and races of the globe, does not most of our Christian mythology seem utterly childish?