Page:Riddles of the Sphinx (1891).djvu/131

IMPOSSIBILITY OF ADAPTATION. 103 of the functions of life is the aim of life, life is a failure, for all its forms must die and pass away.

§ 6. Nor is there adaptation to the social environment: births, marriages, and deaths ring the changes of our social happiness. How can there be stability in relations where all the acting forces come and go, are attracted and divorced by influences they can neither calculate nor govern? To set one's heart upon the fortunes of another does but multiply the sources of its deadly hurt, and the more expose our vitals to the shafts of fortune. For in the end all love is loss, and all affection breeds affliction. What does it then avail to vow in vain a faith that fate frustrates? why should our will weave ties that death and chance must shatter?

Does not true wisdom, then, lie in a self-centred absorption in one's own interests? Is not a cool and calm selfishness, which does not place its happiness in aught beyond its self, which engages in social relations but does not engage itself in them, the primary condition of prosperity? Does not the sage's soul retire into its own sphere and contemplate its own intrinsic radiance, unbroken, untouched and unobscured by sympathetic shadows from the lives of others? Is not feeling with others in very truth sympathy, suffering with them?

§ 7. The dream of such a self-sufficing severance from all physical and social ties may be an ideal for fakirs, but it is impossible for men. And even were it possible, happiness would be as little found in the individual soul as in the social life.

For here too, harmony is unattainable: the discords of the essential elements of our nature can never be composed by beings subjected to the material world of Time and Space. It is impossible