Page:Maria Felicia.pdf/153

hereafter seems to me a fable, invented to satisfy the minds of large children who are afraid to walk alone over dizzy paths of thought. Were you right, Count Felsenburk, in teaching your daughter, both by precept and example, that position and wealth are the end and aim of life? Were you right in calling every other end and aim only folly? Were you right in teaching that the earth is nothing more than a combination of matter and force, moving and changing in space where the two law-makers, chance and necessity, continually struggle for supremacy, while under their despotic rule human souls rise and fall like bubbles? Every one who has troubled his head to discover something more hopeful and better you have called a lunatic. Is all beyond this life mere emptiness, absolute nothingness? Has mind no other dwelling-place than the human head? If such is the case, how deceptive is this gift that nature has bestowed upon man, for he has not a moment in this life when he may escape the feeling of his misery and insignificance!”