r 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.

This world, and our racial adventure, are magical still.

_TWENTY_

Yet although for high-spirited marchers the march is sufficient, there
still is that other way of looking at it that we dare not forget. Our
adventure may satisfy _us_: does it satisfy Nature? She is letting us
camp for awhile here among the wrecked graveyards of mightier
dynasties, not one of which met her tests. Their bones are the message
the epochs she murdered have left us: we have learned to decipher their
sickening warning at last.

* * * * *

Yes, and even if we are permitted to have a long reign, and are not
laid away with the failures, are we a success?

We need so much spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our airships
may some day float over the hills of Arcturus, but how will that help
us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is that soul alive and
loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead?

We have no sure vision. Hopes, guesses, beliefs--that is all.

There are sounds we are deaf to, there are strange sights invisible to
us. There are whole realms of splendor, it may be, of which we are
heedless; and which we are as blind to as ants to the call of the sea.

Life is enormously flexible--look at all that we've done to our
dogs,--but we carry our hairy past with us wherever we go. The wise St.
Bernards and the selfish toy lap-dogs are brothers, and some things are
possible for them and others are not. So with us. There are definite
limits to simian civilizations, due in part to some primitive traits
that help keep us alive, and in part to the mere fact that every being
has to be something, and when one is a simian one is not also
everything else. Our main-springs are fixed, and our principal traits
are deep-rooted. We cannot now re-live the ages whose imprint we bear.

We have but to look back on our past to have hope in our future:
but--it will be only _our_ future, not some other race's. We shall
win our own triumphs, yet know that they would have been different, had
we cared above all for creativeness, beauty, or love.

* * * * *

So we run about, busy and active, ma