life-stuff in which is packed such marvellous potentialities? Evidently
love must be somewhere in the universe--else it had not got into the
heart of man; and perhaps pity slides down like an angel in the rays of
the solar energy, while there is the potential beating of a human heart
even in the hard crust of the carbon compounds.

I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting
speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe;
but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?

There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the
world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are
cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic
spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts
and birds.

Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there
be, man has one certainty--himself. Science has really adduced nothing
essential against his significance. That he is not as big as an Alp, as
heavy as a star, or as long-lived as an eagle, is nothing against his
proper importance. Even a nobleman is of more significance in the world
than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or
spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the
great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey
bulk of Mars.

After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the
importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he
was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not
nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him