Rationalists persist in endeavouring to convince men that there are motives for living and that there is a consolation for having been born, even though there must come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, illustrate the amazing affectional and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy that is resolved to sacrifice sincerity to veracity and not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power. Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this idea of creating culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, divorced from all preoccupation with the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last end of everything, in four days or in four million centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this culture, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest? Many and various have been the rationalist devices--more or less rational--from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics, by means of which it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men--though the convincers were themselves unconvinced--that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined ultimately to disappear. The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” or the Horatian _carpe diem_, which may be rendered by “Live for the day,” is not radically different from the Stoic attitude with its “Do what your conscience tells you, and afterward let it be as it may be.” Both attitudes have a common base, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake comes to the same thing as duty for duty’s sake.