d serious men, due to the conflict of inductive knowledge, with
conceptions of right and wrong deduced from unsound, but uncriticised,
first principles. The old ethical principles, the principle of
equivalents or justice, the principle of self-sacrifice, the various
vague and arbitrary ideas of purity, chastity, and sexual "sin," came
like rays out of the theological and philosophical lanterns men carried
in the darkness. The ray of the lantern indicated and directed, and one
followed it as one follows a path. But now there has come a new view of
man's place in the scheme of time and space, a new illumination, dawn;
the lantern rays fade in the growing brightness, and the lanterns that
shone so brightly are becoming smoky and dim. To many men this is no
more than a waning of the lanterns, and they call for new ones, or a
trimming of the old. They blame the day for putting out these flares.
And some go apart, out of the glare of life, into corners of obscurity,
where the radiation of the lantern may still be faintly traced. But,
indeed, with the new light there has come the time for new methods; the
time of lanterns, the time of deductions from arbitrary first principles
is over. The act of faith is no longer to follow your lantern, but to
put it down. We can see about us, and by the landscape we must go.[51]

How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new time
and in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose that these
men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own?
Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer,
I believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin,
that the scheme of being, in which we live is a struggle of existences
to expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and to
propagate and increase themselves. But, being men of action, they will
feel nothing of the glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexually
vitiated shareholder, Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. The
final object of this struggle among existences they will not understand;
they will have abandoned the search for ultimates; they will state this
scheme of a struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote and
spacious to enclose and explain all their possible activities. They will
seek God's purpose in the sphere of their activities, and desire no
more, as the soldier in battle desires no more, than the immediate
conflict