But is man happy? Is his game worth the candle? The sophisticated reply that the fear of death proves that life is worth while, since all are so eager to avoid it. But this is worse than no answer for it predicates either no life at all, which is certainly no recommendation, or that there may be worse things _there_ than those which befall man _here_--certainly no proof of a keen joy in this. The essential tragedy of life, then, and the thing which makes it painful to consider, is this: that once man is raised above the non-cerebrating and automatic sensory responsiveness of the beast he becomes conscious of the rather obvious fact that he is either an intelligently or an accidentally evoluted mechanism or minute tool in the hands of something so much more significant than himself that he is as nothing; and again, that to this force or intelligence above him his little earthly schemes bear about as much relationship as do those of an office boy bent on becoming a baseball pitcher to those of the Standard Oil Company or the German Emperor bent on world dominion. And again--and this is the darkest thought of all--it, our personal Creator, assumed by the religionists at least to be so careful of our individual welfare, may be little more than the veriest tyro in so far as the larger and largest creative forces or impulses in the universe are concerned. Manifesting little or no interest in us, no more perhaps than is needful to its own welfare, it may be as little to the powers above it as are we to it. For who can guess whether the thing or power which makes man is the ultimate power or guiding force in so spacious a thing as the universe? Already our chemists and physicists are inclined to doubt it. Its impulses, humors, appetites and methods, as manifest in man, are by no means of so glorious or illuminating a character as to inspire admiration, even in its machine: man. Plainly, its methods and actions bespeak as much of the lowest as of the highest that we know, and this is as much evidenced by the thoughts, aspirations, tastes or habits, chemically compulsory or no, of man, its product, and through whom it seemingly expresses itself, as by its methods and procedure in other ways, fumbling efforts and failures of all kinds. For man in his capacity as chemist, physicist, fumbling philosopher, didactic or synchronetic poet, experimenter or agnostic is scarcely a fit creature for one to contemplate as the highest product of a so-called supreme intelligence or God, or Good, however well he might look as the product of a minor and so seeking hieratic power. For if God, or Good, as so many have already pointed out, can do no better than produce the quarreling, eating, seeking, spewing thing we know as man--and that is the chief concern of His intelligence--!!!