“Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy motive.... Perform action ... dwelling in union with the divine, renouncing attachments and balanced evenly in success and failure.... Pitiable are they who work for fruit.... Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining from activity, nor by mere renunciation doth he rise to perfection.... Perform thou right action, for action is superior to inaction; and, inactive, even the maintenance of thy body would not be possible. The world is bound by action, unless performed for the sake of sacrifice.... “He who seeth inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is harmonious, even while performing all action. Whose works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have called a sage. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing actions.... He should be known as a perpetual ascetic, who neither hateth nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites ... he is easily set free from bondage....” And remember that this, which forms part of the _Mahabharata_, the greatest epic on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago. 4 Whatever we may think of the plausibility of the doctrine or revelation, we cannot dispute that this morality and this justification of justice are the most ancient and at the same time the most beautiful and reassuring that the mind of man has imagined. But they are based upon a postulate which we are perhaps too much inclined to refuse blindly. It asks us in fact to admit that our existence does not end at the hour of our death and that the spirit, or the vital spark, which does not perish, seeks an asylum and reappears in other bodies. At first the postulate seems monstrous and unacceptable; but on closer examination its aspect becomes much less strange, less arbitrary and less unreasonable. It is, to begin with, certain that, if all things undergo transformation, nothing perishes or is annihilated in a universe which knows no nothingness and in which nothingness alone remains absolutely inconceivable. What we call nothingness could therefore be only another mode of existence, of persistence and of life; and, if we cannot admit that the body, which is only matter, is annihilated in its substance, it is no less difficult to admit that, if it were animated by a spirit--which it is hardly possible to dispute--this spirit should disappear without leaving a trace of any kind.