newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life

is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble

of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is
still very painfully" target="_blank" title="ad.痛苦地；费力地">painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions

under which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit
of adjustment, and the "ills of life," of the individual life that

is, are due to its "disharmonies." Man, acutely aware of himself as
an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species,

finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He
fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph

of his kind. He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of
victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal

extinction.
Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-

religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is
confused with priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with

disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and
misguidance. How completely he misconceives the quality of

religion, how completely he sees it as an individual's affair, his
own words may witness:

"Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The
solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as

satisfactory. A future life has no single argument to support it,
and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the

whole range of human knowledge. On the other hand, resignation as
preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a

longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the
inevitability of death."

Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death,
and by a future life the prolongation of individuality. But

Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with
that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that

preoccupation with the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from
"preaching resignation" to death, seeks as its greater good a death

so complete as to be absoluterelease from the individual's burthen
of KARMA. Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.

The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it
approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and

over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor
Metchnikoff's assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to lose

one's self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that
this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the

religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if
they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it

is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape
from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is

the ultimate of religion.
At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true

solution round and about which his writing goes. He suggests as his
most hopefulsatisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such

a scientific prolongation of life that the instinct for self-
preservation will be at last extinct. If that is not the very

"resignation" he imputes to the Buddhist I do not know what it is.
He believes that an individual which has lived fully and completely

may at last welcome death with the same instinctive readiness as, in
the days of its strength, it shows for the embraces of its mate. We

are to be glutted by living to six score and ten. We are to rise
from the table at last as gladly as we sat down. We shall go to

death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed. Men are to have
a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime,

and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and

twenty or thereabouts) and public service!
(But why, one asks, public service? Why not book-collecting or the

simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?
Metchnikoff never faces that question. And again, what of the man

who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty? What does
the prolongation of life do for him? And where are the consolations

for accidentalmisfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost
limb?)

But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure
religiosity. The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-

sacrifice as the fundamental "remedy." And indeed what other remedy
has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?

"On the other hand," he writes, "the knowledge that the goal of
human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree

of solidarity amongst men will restrainactual egotism. The mere
fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon

(Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will
lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury. Conviction that

science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human
constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and

to the solidarity of mankind.
* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a

merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be
always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with

the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity,
which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity

for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou
takest under the sun. whatever">whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with

thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

"In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted
continuously. Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has

produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death.
In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the

gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts. Just as he
has been able to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must

attempt to modify his own constitution, so as to readjust its
disharmonies. . . .

"To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to
frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the

resources of science.
"If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of

religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific
principles. And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that

man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of
science."

Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of
"religion" and "philosophy" as remedies for human ills, is nothing

less than the fundamentalproposition of the religious life
translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that

damnation is really over-individuation and that salvahon is escape
from self into the larger being of life. . . .

What can this "religion of the future" be but that devotion to the
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already

found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed
away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an

inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have
already reached conclusions identical with this ultimaterefuge of

an extreme materialist.
This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our

God--an altar rather indistinctly inscribed.
2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD

Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were

the statement of an anonymous God. Everything is said that a
religious writer would say--except that God is not named. Religious

metaphors abound. It is as if they accepted the living body of
religion but denied the bones that held it together--as they might

deny the bones of a friend. It is true, they would admit, the body
moves in a way that implies bones in its every movement, but --WE

HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE BONES.
The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--

between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at
times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to

students of physics, whether the scientific "ether" is real or a