And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan.

"And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab,
according to the word of the Lord.... But no man knoweth of his sepulchre
unto this day.

"And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was
not dim, nor his natural force abated."

The facts, as preserved by Josephus, appear to have been these: Moses
ascended the mountain with only the elders, the high priest Eleazar, and
Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as
he was embracing Joshua and Eleazar and still speaking, a cloud covered
him, and he disappeared in a ravine. In other words, he killed himself.

Such is the story of Moses, a fragment of history interesting enough in
itself, but especially material to us not only because of the development
of the thought dealt with in the following volumes, but of the inferences
which, at the present time, it permits us to draw touching our own
immediate future.

Moses was the first great optimist of whom any record remains, and one of
the greatest. He was the prototype of all those who have followed. He was
a visionary. All optimists must be visionaries. Moses based the social
system which he tried to organize, not on observed facts, but on _a
priori_ theories evolved out of his own mind, and he met with the
failure that all men of that cast of mind must meet with when he sought to
realize his visions. His theory was that the universe about him was the
expression of an infinite mind which operated according to law. That this
mind, or consciousness, was intelligent and capable of communicating with