Yet even the individual, much as they strove to exalt his capabilities, was in the end cheapened in his own eyes.[139] As men have deepened their self-consciousness, they have yielded to an instinctive craving for the immortality of the soul.[140] Whether savages feel this or not, it is needless to argue. No religion apart from Buddhism has permanently held men which had no hopes of immortality; and how far the corruptions of Buddhism have modified its rigour for common people, it is not easy to say. In one form or another, in spite of a terrible want of evidence, men have clung to eternal life. The Stoics themselves used this consensus of opinion as evidence for the truth of the belief.[141] "It pleased me," writes Seneca, "to inquire of the eternity of souls (_de aeternitate animarum_)--nay! to believe in it. I surrendered myself to that great hope."[142] {69} "How natural it is!" he says, "the human mind is a great and generous thing; it will have no bounds set to it unless they are shared by God."[143] "When the day shall come, which shall part this mixture of divine and human, here, where I found it, I will leave my body, myself I will give back to the gods. Even now I am not without them." He finds in our birth into this world an analogy of the soul passing into another world, and in language of beauty and sympathy he pictures the "birthday of the eternal," the revelation of nature's secrets, a world of light and more light. "This thought suffers nothing sordid to dwell in the mind, nothing mean, nothing cruel. It tells us that the gods see all, bids us win their approval, prepare for them, and set eternity before us."[144] Beautiful words that wake emotion yet! [Sidenote: Immortality] But is it clear that it is eternity after all? In the _Consolation_ which Seneca wrote for Marcia, after speaking of the future life of her son, he passed at last to the Stoic doctrine of the first conflagration, and described the destruction of the present scheme of things that it may begin anew. "Then we also, happy souls who have been assigned to eternity (_felices animae et aeterna sortitae_), when God shall see fit to reconstruct the universe, when all things pass (_labentibus_), we too, a little element in a great catastrophe, shall be resolved into our ancient elements. Happy is your son, Marcia, who already knows this."[145] Elsewhere he is still less certain. "Why am I wasted for desire of him, who is either happy or non-existent? (_qui aut beatus aut nullus est_)."[146]