“I intentionally leave out of consideration here the unspeakable sufferings of mankind. Believers in the Bible find it so convenient to argue about original sin. Where is the original sin of the tormented animal kingdom?
“Of course man in his unutterable pride looks with deep disdain on all living creatures that are not human. As if he were not bone of their bone, as if suffering did not form a common bond with all living creatures! (I have never done that, but I think that it is difficult to establish a thermometer of suffering.)
“Do you not bethink you, honoured student of Sanskrit, of the religion of the Brahmins? In sparing all animals, the Hindus have shown only the broadest consistency.
“There will come a time when there will be only one religion, without dogma: the religion of compassion. (Buddhism is founded on Kârunya, compassion.) Christianity, lofty as is its ethical content, is not the goal, but only a stage in our religious development.
“It is a misfortune that Nietzsche, the great keen thinker, should have been misled into an opposite conclusion by the mental weakness, the paralytic imbecility, which gradually enveloped his brain like a growth of mould. And the foolish youths, who esteem the expressions of this incipient insanity as the revelations of a vigorous genius, swear by his later [pg 079] hallucinations about the Over-man and the blond beast.
“A specialist in mental disease can point out the traces of his malady years before it openly broke out. And as if he had not written enough when the world still considered him of sound mind, must men still try to glean from the time when his brain was already visibly clouded?
“How few there are who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing imbecility the scanty grains of higher intelligence! There will always be people who will be impressed, not by the sound part of his thought, but by his paradoxical nonsense. (May be.)
“But—I am straying from the path. Now to the subject. I perfectly understand that the majority of religions had to assume a good and evil principle to guard themselves against the blasphemy of attributing all the suffering of the world to an all-merciful Creator. (Some religions have done this, on the theory that an almighty God stands beyond good and evil.) The devil is a necessary antithesis to God; to deny him is the first step made by the consistent man of science toward that atheism which originates really from the search for a better God. The Horseherd is wrong when he denies the existence of things beyond our power of conception. There are, as can be proved, tones that we do not hear, and rays that we cannot see. There are many things that we shall learn to comprehend in the hundreds of thousands of years that are in store for mankind. We are merely [pg 080] in the beginning of our development. Something, however, will always remain over. The ‘Ignorabimus’ of one of our foremost thinkers and investigators will always retain its value for us. (Most certainly.)
“The other world is of but little concern to him who has constantly endeavoured to lead a good life, even if he has never given much thought to correct belief. If personal existence is continued, our earthly being must be divested of so many of its outer husks that we should scarcely recognise each other, for only a part of the soul is the soul. (What we call soul is a modification of the Self.) If, however, an eternal sleep is decreed for us, then this can be no great misfortune. Let the wise saying in Stobœi Florilegium, Vol. VI, No. 19, in ‘praise of death’ serve to comfort us: ‘Ἀναξαγόρας δύο ἔλεγε διδασκαλίας εῖναι θανάτου, τὸν τε πρὸ τοῦ γενέσθαι χρόνον καὶ τὸν ὕπνον,’—‘Anaxagoras said that two things admonished us about death: the time before birth and sleep.’
“The raindrop, because it is a drop, may fear for its individuality when it falls back into the sea whence it came. We men are perhaps only passing drops formed out of the everlasting changes of the world-sea. (Of what does the world-sea consist but drops?)