Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things. As life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize itself and life. Every effect is in turn a cause. Therefore every cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued life of the cause. Universes and the soul of man are but self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within Cause immortal, effect within effect unending. "Man," it has been said, "is the inventor of Nothingness. Nature and the Universe know it not." The past wields over the present a power which could never be derived from Death and Nothingness. No age, as was pointed out in the first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present. As if we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the scenes designed for other eyes. Even our most living impulses we interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands, so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were dead. But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when most deeply absorbed in the past. The soul of man is the true Logos of the universe. It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of the aeons is it a stranger. It heard the informing voice which instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and the hills about them like a covering of flesh. Therefore time and death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets over against the substance which lives and is eternally. And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is, the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed," seems realized. The death of a State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is secured.