That loftiness within us, from whose summit we venture to pass
judgment on the totality of life, to absolve or condemn it, is
doubtless the merest pin-prick, visible to our eye alone, on the
illimitable sphere of life. It is wise to think and to act as though
all that happened to man were all that man most required. It is not
long ago--to cite only one of the problems that the instinct of our
planet is invited to solve--that a scheme was on foot to inquire of
the thinkers of Europe whether it should rightly be held as a gain
or a loss to mankind if an energetic, strenuous, persistent race,
which some, through prejudice doubtless, still regard as inferior to
the Aryan in qualities of heart and of soul--if the Jews, in a word,
were to vanish from the face of the earth, or to acquire
preponderance there. I am satisfied that the sage might answer,
without laying himself open to the charge of indifference or undue
resignation, "In what comes to pass will be happiness." Many things
happen that seem unjust to us; but of all the achievements of reason
there has been none so helpful as the discovery of the loftier
reason that underlies the misdeeds of nature. It is from the slow
and gradual vindication of the unknown force that we deemed at first
to be pitiless, that our moral and physical life has derived its
chief prop and support. If a race disappears that conforms with our
every ideal, it will be only because our ideal still falls short of
the grand ideal, which is, as we have said, the intimate truth of
the universe.

Our own experience has taught us that even in this world of reality
there exist dreams and desires, thoughts and feelings of beauty, of
justice, and love, that are of the noblest and loftiest. And if
there be any that shrink from the test of reality--in other words,
from the mysterious, nameless power of life--it follows that these