purpose
"I keep finding myself confronted with the question, "What is the aim of a person's life?" and, no matter what result, my reflections reach, no matter what I take to be a life's source, I invariably arrive at the conclusion that the purpose of our human existence is to afford a maximum of help towards the universal development of everything that exists.
If I meditate as I contemplate nature, I perceive everything in nature to be in a constant process of development, and each of nature's constituent portions to be unconsciously contributing towards the development of others. But the human is, though a like portion of nature, a portion gifted with consciousness, and therefore bound, like the other portions, to make conscious use of his spiritual faculties in striving for the development of everything existent.
If I meditate as I contemplate history, I perceive the whole human race to be forever aspiring towards the same end.
If I meditate on reason, if I pass in review man's spiritual faculties, I find the soul of every human to have in it the same unconscious aspiration, the same imperative demand of the spirit.
If I meditate with an eye upon the history of philosophy, I find everywhere, and always, men to have arrived at the conclusion that the aim of human life is the universal development of humanity.
If I meditate with an eye upon theology, I find almost every nation to be cognizant of a perfect existence towards which it is the aim of mankind to aspire.
So I too shall be safe in taking for the aim of my existence a conscious striving for the universal development of everything existent. I should be the unhappiest of mortals if I could not find a purpose for my life, and a purpose at once universal and useful… Wherefore henceforth all my life must be a constant, active striving for that one purpose."
realization
"The unknown is not the unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations.
For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in a human, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy.
But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is a knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in human there is the inalienable impulse of nature towards self-realization, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can forever prevail."