dispelled problems that have seemed insoluble mysteries to many
generations of men. I do not say it has solved them, but it has
dispelled them and made them irrelevant and uninteresting. So long as
one believed that life span unprogressively from generation to
generation, that generation followed generation unchangingly for ever,
the enormous preponderance of sexual needs and emotions in life was a
distressing and inexplicable fact--it was a mystery, it was sin, it was
the work of the devil. One asked, why does man build houses that others
may live therein; plant trees whose fruit he will never see? And all
the toil and ambition, the stress and hope of existence, seemed, so far
as this life went, and before these new lights came, a mere sacrifice
to this pointless reiteration of lives, this cosmic _crambe
repetita_. To perceive this aspect, and to profess an entire
detachment from the whole vacuous business was considered by a large
proportion of the more thoughtful people of the world the supreme
achievement of philosophy. The acme of old-world wisdom, the ultimate
mystery of Oriental philosophy is to contemn women and offspring, to
abandon costume, cleanliness, and all the decencies and dignities of
life, and to crawl, as scornfully as possible, but at any rate to crawl
out of all these earthly shows and snares (which so obviously lead to
nothing), into the nearest tub.

And the amazing revelation of our days is that they do not lead to
nothing! Directly the discovery is made clear--and it is, I firmly
believe, the crowning glory of the nineteenth century to have
established this discovery for all time--that one generation does not
follow another in _fac simile_, directly we come within sight of
the reasonable persuasion that each generation is a step, a definite
measurable step, and each birth an unprecedented experiment, directly
it grows clear that instead of being in an eddy merely, we are for all