Impersonal considerations go a long way to fortify the mind against the personal sorrow caused by death. But they do not by themselves solve the wider problems that confound even the impersonal intellect of man when he considers some of the implications of death within the limits of his ordinary experience. If death is regarded as the final annihilation of individual existence, there seems to be an irreparable loss to the universe. Each individual may be in a position to give to the universe something so unique that no one else can exactly replace it. Further, in most cases there is the cutting short of an earthly career long before the attainment of spiritual Perfection by the individual. All his struggles toward the ideal, all his endeavor and enthusiasm for the great, the good, and the beautiful, and all his aspirations for things divine and eternal seem to end in the vast nothingness created by death.
-Discourses 7th Ed., p303