, what a brilliant
and enterprising failure he at least will have been. I felt this with a
kind of warm suddenness only today, as I finished these dreamings and
drove through the gates of the park. I had been shutting my modern
surroundings out of my thoughts, so completely, and living as it were
in the wild world of ages ago, that when I let myself come back
suddenly to the twentieth century, and stare at the park and the
people, the change was tremendous. All around me were the well-dressed
descendants of primitive animals, whizzing about in bright motors, past
tall, soaring buildings. What gifted, energetic achievers they suddenly
seemed!

I thought of a photograph I had once seen, of a ship being torpedoed.
There it was, the huge, finely made structure, awash in the sea, with
tiny black spots hanging on to its side--crew and passengers. The great
ship, even while sinking, was so mighty, and those atoms so helpless.
Yet, it was those tiny beings that had created that ship. They had
planned it and built it and guided its bulk through the waves. They had
also invented a torpedo that could rend it asunder.

* * * * *

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 ou