but a small portion. All the whole human drift, from the first ape-man
to the last savant, is but a phantom, a flash of light and a flutter of
movement across the infinite face of the starry night.

When the thermometer drops, man ceases--with all his lusts and wrestlings
and achievements; with all his race-adventures and race-tragedies; and
with all his red killings, billions upon billions of human lives
multiplied by as many billions more. This is the last word of Science,
unless there be some further, unguessed word which Science will some day
find and utter. In the meantime it sees no farther than the starry void,
where the "fleeting systems lapse like foam." Of what ledger-account is
the tiny life of man in a vastness where stars snuff out like candles and
great suns blaze for a time-tick of eternity and are gone?

And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to the
earliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of forgotten
civilisation--ruined cities, which, on excavation, are found to rest on
ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and fourteen cities, down to a
stratum where, still earlier, wandering herdsmen drove their flocks, and
where, even preceding them, wild hunters chased their prey long after the
cave-man and the man of the squatting-place cracked the knuckle-bones of
wild animals and vanished from the earth. There is nothing terrible
about it. With Richard Hovey, when he faced his death, we can say:
"Behold! I have lived!" And with another and greater one, we can lay
ourselves down with a will. The one drop of living, the one taste of
being, has been good; and perhaps our greatest achievement will be that
we dreamed immortality, even though we failed to realise it.