energy, the
dulness of the average intellect, and the vast deadweight of
superstition and dread of the light with which all improvement must
have to reckon. And yet I also feel that, if a complacent optimism be
impossible, the world was never so full of interest. When we complain
of the stress and strain and over-excitement of modern society we
indicate, I think, a real evil; but we also tacitly admit that no one
has any excuse for being dull. In every direction there is abundant
opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation
for whatever energy they may possess. There is work to be found
everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an
excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. The fields, surely, are
white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated,
and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in
the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days
of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in
Wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a
star was the chariot of a deity. The poor deity, however, had, in fact,
a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the Underground Railway. To
us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe beyond
universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds
forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange
fascination. The prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old
figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the
real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more
effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling
conception of the universe represented by Dante's superlative power;
and made incredible the systems based on the conception that man can be
the centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of this
place. It is enough to point to the similar change due to modern
theories of evolution. The impassable barriers of thought are broken
down. Instead of the verbal explanation, which made every plant and
animal an ultimate and inexplicable fact, we now see in each a movement
in an indefinite series of complex processes, stretching back further
than the eye can reach into the indefinite past. If we are sometimes
stunned by the sense of inconceivable vastness, we feel, at least, that
no intellectual conqueror ne