It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless
universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling
star: but even so--and all the more--what marvelous creatures we are!
What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is
a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians!
It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A
universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is--blind
or not--a good world to live in, a promising universe.

And if there are no other such accidents, if we stand alone, if all
the uncountable armies of planets are empty, or peopled by animals
only, with no keys to thought, then we have done something so mighty,
what may it not lead to! What powers may we not develop before the
Sun dies! We once thought we lived on God's footstool: it may be
a throne.

This is no world for pessimists. An amoeba on the beach, blind and
helpless, a mere bit of pulp,--that amoeba has grandsons today who
read Kant and play symphonies. Will those grandsons in turn have
descendants who will sail through the void, discover the foci of
forces, the means to control them, and learn how to marshal the
planets and grapple with space? Would it after all be any more
startling than our rise from the slime?

No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any
of his most remote children would build and run dynamos. Few
sensible men of today stop to feel, in their hearts, that we live
in the very same world where that miracle happened.