l form as an attempted
explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized
nations as an allegorical type of man's own history and destiny, and
thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the
mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its
interpretation in psychology.

Broadly surveying the life of man, philosophers have found in it much
matter fit either for mockery or tears. We are born with a thirst for
pleasure; we learn that pain alone is felt. We ask health; and having
it, never notice it till it is gone. In the ardent pursuit of enjoyment,
we waste our capacity of appreciation. Every sweet we gain is sauced
with a bitter. Our eyes forever bent on the future, which can never be
ours, we fritter away the present, which alone we possess. Ere we have
got ourselves ready to live, we must die. Fooling ourselves even here,
we represent death as the portal to joy unspeakable; and forthwith
discredit our words by avoiding it in every possible way.

Pitiable spectacle of weakness and folly, is it capable of any
explanation which can redeem man from the imputation of unreason? Is
Wisdom even here justified of her children by some deeper law of being?

The theologian explains it as the unrest of the soul penned in its house
of clay; the physiologist attributes it to the unceasing effort of
organic functions to adapt themselves to ever varying external
conditions. They are both right, for the theologian, were his words
translated into the language of science, refers to the _effort to adapt
condition to function_, which is the peculiar faculty of intelligence,
and which alone renders man unable to accept the comfort of merely
animal existence, an inability which he need never expect to outlive,
for it will increase in exact proportion to his mental development.
Action, not rest, as I have elsewhere said, must be his ideal of life.

In even his lowest levels man experiences this dissatisfaction. It may
there be confined to a pain he would be free from, or a pleasure he
dreams of. Always the future charms him, and as advancing years increase
the number of his disappointments and bring with them the pains of
decrepitude, he also recurs to the past, when youth was his, and the
world was bright and gay. Thus it comes that most nations speak of some
earlier period of their history as one characterized by purer public
virtues than the present, one when the fires of patriot