internally and privately to tame my somewhat decivilized nature--
decivilised by that veterinary philosophy and animal science
(Darwinism) in which, as student at the university, I was reared.
And I assure my fellow-beings that they have no right to complain
because, according to my ability, I practise the Christian
teachings. For only through religion, or the hope of something
better, and the recognition of the innermost meaning of life as
that of an ordeal, a school, or perhaps a penitentiary, will it be
possible to bear the burden of life with sufficient resignation."

Here, as elsewhere, it is made patent that Strindberg's
religiosity always, on closer analysis, reduces itself to
morality. At bottom he is first and last, and has always been, a
moralist--a man passionately craving to know what is RIGHT and to
do it. During the middle, naturalistic period of his creative
career, this fundamental tendency was in part obscured, and he
engaged in the game of intellectual curiosity known as "truth for
truth's own sake." One of the chief marks of his final and
mystical period is his greater courage to "be himself" in this
respect--and this means necessarily a return, or an advance, to a
position which the late William James undoubtedly would have
acknowledged as "pragmatic." To combat the assertion of over-
developed individualism that we are ends in ourselves, that we
have certain inalienable personal "rights" to pleasure and
happiness merely because we happen to appear here in human shape,
this is one of Strindberg's most ardent aims in all his later
works.

As to the higher and more inclusive object to which our lives must
be held subservient, he is not dogmatic. It may be another life.