It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short--sighted philosophers of the last century to “labor for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old historic religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion), since the solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes, as come it must, when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy seas flow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness,--what in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the works and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be forever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as man. _This_ is what SCIENCE teaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who shall talk to us of “laboring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognized as a dream, wherein no man in a scientific age can long indulge.[8] The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic teachers is, as above said, “to welcome the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings.” This lesson, though repeated more or less by nearly all Agnostic and Comtist writers, has been perhaps most prominently brought to the front in the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her observations and example as the text for the remarks I wish to offer upon it, as I have done the papers of Mr. Frederick Harrison for those just made on the doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some of her utterances which touch on the matter:--