The so-called ultimate questions troubled mankind in the world's dawn as badly as they trouble us now. Adam and Eve wanted "to know," and they plucked the fruit at their risk. Cain, whose sacrifice did not please God, raised his hand against his brother: and it seemed to him he committed murder in the name of justice, in vindication of his own injured rights. Nobody has ever been able to understand why God preferred Abel's sacrifice to that of Cain. In our own day Sallieri repeats Cain's vengeance and poisons his friend and benefactor Mozzart, according to the poem of Poushkin. "All say, there is no justice on earth; but there is no justice up above: this is as clear to me as a simple scale of music." No man on earth can fail to recognise in these words his own tormenting doubts. The outcome is creative tragedy, which for some mysterious reason has been considered up till now as the highest form of human creation. Everything is being unriddled and explained. If we compare our knowledge with that of the ancients, we appear very wise. But we are no nearer to solving the riddle of eternal justice than Cain was. Progress, civilisation, all the conquests of the human mind have brought us nothing new here. Like our ancestors, we stand still with fright and perplexity before ugliness, disease, misery, senility, death. All that the wise men have been able to do so far is to turn the earthly horrors into problems. We are told that perhaps all that is horrible only _appears_ horrible, that perhaps at the end of the long journey something new awaits us. Perhaps! But the modern educated man, with the wisdom of all the centuries of mankind at his command, knows no more about it than the old singer who solved universal problems at his own risk. We, the children of a moribund civilisation, we, old men from our birth, in this respect are as young as the first man. 52 They say it is impossible to set a bound between the "I" and society. _Naïveté_! Crusoes are to be found not only on desert islands. They are there, in populous cities. It is true they are not clad in skins, they have no dark Fridays in attendance, and so nobody recognises them. But surely Friday and a fur jacket do not make a Crusoe. Loneliness, desertion, a boundless, shoreless sea, on which no sail has risen for tens of years,--do not many of our contemporaries live in such a circumstance? And are they not Crusoes, to whom the rest of people have become a vague reminiscence, barely distinguishable from a dream? 53 To be irremediably unhappy--this is shameful. An irremediably unhappy person is outside the laws of the earth. Any connection between him and society is severed finally. And since, sooner or later, every individual is doomed to irremediable unhappiness, _the last word, of philosophy is loneliness_. 54