And that, too, you observe, is in the approved time-tested style. For it is through consideration of his own unimportance and transiency that man rises to the largest resonance of poetry and wisdom. Vanity of vanities! saith the Preacher, the son of David: and Æschylos answers, Oh, ye little race of men, what does your living show! and goes on with the customary observations as to parti-colored leaves that are swept away by the wind. Horace takes up the tale, We are all bound on one voyage. Villon continues with derogatory evaluations of the final worth of the fair queens and the thrasonical potentates and the melted snows of yesterday; and Shakespeare rounds off the dirge with the assertion that human living, however full of sound and fury, signifies precisely nothing.... Everywhere fine literature, in its more purple passages, tends to voice the futility of man's endeavors, the impermanence of his works, and his generally unarguable claims not to be worth writing about. Nevertheless,--here to continue in this high scholastic vein,--nevertheless, as Chrysippus of Cnidos, you will remember, has strikingly phrased a weighty truth, in that noble monograph _On the Cabbage_ (which some critics of the Alexandrian school, as we should of course with due caution bear in mind, would attribute to a somewhat later date and to a pupil of Erasistratus),--nevertheless, death is the one impending fact which is certain. Now, thought of in its physical aspects, death is an indignity before which any sort of human self-respect--not here to speak of the wild actuality of human pride,--becomes preposterous. Thought about logically, it makes any conceivable human action rather silly, as upon the whole inappropriate to condemned persons in a death cell. Thought of in the light of man's possible immortality, it seems no longer to raise, if ever it did, any positive enthusiasm. And so beyond doubt the majority of us act wiseliest by not thinking about it at all, except as a thing which happens to other people.