There is no sure prize for virtue, and no sure punishment for sin. Nor would it be right for such prizes and punishments to exist. Virtue and sin are inevitable manifestations in organisms which, condemned to one thing or the other, serve their sentences of being good or of being bad. That’s why all religions place rewards and punishments – deserved by people who were nothing and could do nothing, and therefore can deserve nothing – in other worlds, which no science can verify and no faith describe.

So let us renounce all sincere beliefs, along with all concern to influence others.

Life, said Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless. Let us always search for the impossible, since that is our destiny, and let us search for it by way of the useless, since no path goes by any other way, but let us rise to the consciousness that nothing we search for can be found, and that nothing along the way deserves a fond kiss or memory.

We weary of everything, said the scholiast, except understanding. Let us understand, let us keep understanding, and let us make ghostly flowers out of this understanding, shrewdly entwining them into wreaths and garlands which are also doomed to wilt.