I am under no delusion; I am fully aware that no demonstration can be given
of the three stepping-stones of the Cavemen. The soul is inscrutable; it is
not in evidence to show that it exists; immortality is not tangible. Full
well I know that
reason and knowledge and experience tend to disprove all three;
that experience denies answer to prayer. I am under no delusion
whatever; I grasp death firmly in conception as I can grasp this
bleached bone; utter extinction, annihilation. That the soul is
a product at best of organic composition; that it goes out like
a flame. This may be the end; my soul may sink like rain into
the earth and disappear. Wind and earth, sea, and night and
day, what then? Let my soul be but a product, what then? I say it is nothing
to me; this only I know, that while I have lived--now, this moment, while I
live--I think immortality, I lift my mind to a Fourth Idea. If I pass into
utter oblivion, yet I have had that.

The original three ideas of the Cavemen became encumbered with
superstition; ritual grew up, and ceremony, and long ranks of
souls were painted on papyri waiting to be weighed in the scales,and to be
punished or rewarded. These cobwebs grotesque have sullied the original
discoveries and cast them
into discredit. Erase them altogether, and consider only the underlying
principles. The principles do not go far enough, but I shall not discard all
of them for that. Even supposing the pure principles to be illusions, and
annihilation the end, even then it is better--it is something gained to have
thought them. Thought is life; to have thought them is to have lived them.
Accepting two of them as true in principle, then I say that these are but
the threshold. For twelve thousand years no effort
has been made to get beyond that threshold. These are but the primer of
soul-life; the merest hieroglyphics chipped out, a little shape given to the