ers growing to supply their places, and that the continual
sequence of these multitudes of little lives has its outcome in the
larger and conscious life of the man as a whole. Our part in the
universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of
the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the
transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind.

Our views of the object of life have to be framed so as not to be
inconsistent with the observed facts from which these various
possibilities are inferred; it is safer that they should not exclude
the possibilities themselves. We must look on the slow progress of
the order of evolution, and the system of routine by which it has
thus far advanced, as due to antecedents and to inherent conditions
of which we have not as yet the slightest conception. It is
difficult to withstand a suspicion that the three dimensions of
space and the fourth dimension of time may be four independent
variables of a system that is neither space nor time, but something
else wholly unconceived by us. Our present enigma as to how a First
Cause could itself have been brought into existence--how the
tortoise of the fable, that bears the elephant that bears the world,
is itself supported,--may be wholly due to our necessary
mistranslation of the four or more variables of the universe,
limited by inherent conditions, into the three unlimited variables
of Space and the one of Time.

Our ignorance of the goal and purport of human life, and the
mistrust we are apt to feel of the guidance of the spiritual sense,
on account of its proved readiness to accept illusions as realities,
warn us against deductive theories of conduct. Putting these, then,
at least for the moment, to one side, we find ourselves face to face
with two great and indisputable facts that everywhere force
themselves on the attention and compel consideration. The one is
that the whole of the living world moves steadily and continuously
towards the evolution of races that are progressively more and more
adapted to their complicated mutual needs and to their external
circumstances. The other is that the process of evolution has been
hitherto apparently carried out with, what we should reckon in our
ways of carrying out projects, great waste of opportunity and of life,
and with little if any consideration for individual mischance.
Measured by our criterion of intelligence and mercy, which consists
in the a