surface a little, and seen
through to the evil, and found myself suddenly and astutely discouraged,
I have found afterward that all I had to do was to see the same thing a
little farther over, set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in
larger or more full relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged.

So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling discouraged
about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed it, too, in watching
other people--men I know. If I could take all the men I know who are
living and acting as if they believed big things about people to-day,
men who are daily taking for granted great things in human nature, and
put them in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then
take all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one
another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people would
find it hard to tell which group would be more clever. Possibly the
reason more of us do not spend more time in being hopeful about the
world is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the
moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees
facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in
which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to
turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down
where they belong in one's mind, the way they would in real time.

So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked
forward, I know the way I am going.

I am going to hope.

It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see
through ones' self; the only way to see through other people and to see
past them, and to see with them and for them--is to hope.

So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put
it to myself.

There are four questions with which day by day we stand face to face:

1. Does human nature change?

2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision?

3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and
new sizes of men?

4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical
and make a new world?

Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this moment, on
how he decides these questions. If he says Yes, he will live one kind of
life, he will live up to his world. If he says No, he will have a mean
world, smaller-minded than he is himself, and he will live down to it.