Then should not man be awakened to such a life—man in whose eyes and soul all this singular and peculiar life is mirrored? Should it be man’s lot alone to be excluded from all this superabounding fulness of original life? Should he be offended at what is a blessing to all other creatures, fear their fulness, find the true task of his life in the renunciation of this fulness? To be sure, the centripetal, solidaric forces of life do indeed awaken in man. With the breadth of his spirit man spans the greatest and the least, compares the likest and the unlikest, combines the nearest and the farthest. But, for all that, he would sin against life, he would commit spiritual suicide, were he to use this systematic power of thought to overpaint gray in gray the variegated world with its colorful magnificence, to make everything in his own world so similar, so uniform and so unicolored, everything that was divinely destined and created for an existence of its own. From everything that was repeated or duplicated in the world would ascend an accusation to God in whose life all human life was rooted. We who would thus be only a repetition of another would have the feeling that we were so much too much, that we were superfluous in the world! For the proof that we are not superfluous in life is to be found in the fact that no one else can be put into our place, can be confounded with us, that there is a gap in life, in the heart, into which no one else can fit, and that if ever another does occupy our place in life, the gap abides, surviving as the only trace of our existence in the human heart, corresponding to our image and our nature. To be superfluous in the world, to fill therein no place of one’s own, to drift and drag about with this feeling—the feeling of all this is alone the real damnation of life, the worst hell that there is in this or in any other world. But the feeling, even with the minimum capital of life, which yet we may call our own—the feeling that one makes a necessary, organic, irreplaceable contribution to the possessions of humanity, this is life indeed; who has this life, and keeps it alive, knows more joy and bliss than any other heaven can guarantee.