ience, is lost in the happy-go-lucky movement of the human
mob. "To see things as they really are" is the purpose of the philosophy
of Pessimism in the hands of its worthiest exponents. But we know what
is, and that alone, even were such knowledge possible, is not to know
the truth. The higher wisdom seeks to find the forces at work to produce
that which now is. The present time is the meeting time of forces; the
present fact their temporary product. To the philosophy of Evolution,
"every meanest day is the conflux of two eternities." Each meanest fact
is the product of the world-forces that lie behind it; each meanest man
the resultant of the vast powers, alive in human nature, struggling
since life began. And these forces, omnipotent and eternal, will never
cease their work.

To the philosophy of Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak,
perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of
"defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience
of its wretched parentage.

In the more hopeful view of Evolution the child exists for its
possibilities. The huge forces within have thrown it to the surface of
time. They will push it onward to development, which may not be much in
the individual case, but beyond it all lie the possibilities of its
race. Inherent in it is the power to rise, to form its own environment,
to stand at last superior to the blind forces by which the human will
was made. With this thought is sure to come, in some degree, the
certainty that the heart of the Universe is sound, that though there be
so many of us in the world, each must have his place, and each at last
"be somehow needful to infinity." We can see that each least creature
has its need for being. The present justifies the past. It is the
transcendent future which renders the commonplace present possible.

The "dragons of the prime,
That tore each other in the slime,"

lived and fought that we their descendants may realize ourselves in
"lives made beautiful and sweet," through all unlikeness to dragons. It
was necessary that every foot of soil in Europe should be crimsoned by
blood, wantonly shed, to bring the relative peace and tolerance of the
civilization of Europe today. It always "needs that offense must come"
to bring about the better condition in which each particular offense
shall be done away. For the evolution of life is not in straight lines
from lower to higher things, but runs rathe