Upon the Etruscan tombs, of all mortuary monuments the most lovely, is to be found a revelation clearer than words of the European attitude toward death--those recumbent figures, all grace and peace, carved by the hands of forgotten genius with so inexplicable a skill that the immemorial stone grows deliquescent before one's eyes as if melting and sinking into the mother earth. In them is no sense of struggle or rebellion. They consent to extinction as gently as autumn's last day fades into the silence and darkness of winter. Their season has been fulfilled. They have lived and loved, and they are proudly willing to sink into the elements from which they rose. It was not until the Asiatic conquests of Alexander brought the mind of Europe into contact with the religions of the East, that this sane attitude was darkened by a conception as radically opposite as the antipodes. Nor did the Roman civilization suffer a shadow upon its manhood until it in turn brought home with its eastern captives that fierce egotism that feared extinction as an irremediable horror. This mind of the other hemisphere could never reconcile itself to the inevitable blotting out of its own individuality. Impossible as it was to deny the incontrovertible fact of death, it conceived, as an escape from the greatest of evils, the idea of the continuance of its identity either in an endless round of reincarnations, or as an impalpable essence triumphant in heaven or defeated in hell. The shadow of their own terror cast upon their imagination the figures of monstrous deities--thousand-armed, myriad-eyed, maleficent, and unakin to themselves. Gods not to be propitiated by song and dance, or the offering of fruit and flowers, but loving to snuff at altars drenched in blood; placated for the sins of the guilty only by the anguish of the innocent, and so meticulous in their tyranny as to require not only the abandonment of all natural appetites, but pursuing even unwitting lapses from submission with eternal and malignant penalties. Oriental egotism flung itself with equal persistence against the limitations of time, space, and character. In the East arose the systems of magic which sought philosopher's stones, elixirs of youth; which endeavoured to overcome all obstacles through pure intensity of will, and undertook to constrain even the prodigious gods it had itself created by sheer force of its own asceticism and determination.