before him. They will admit failure as an individual aspect of
things, as a soldier seeking victory admits the possibility of death;
but they will refuse to admit as a part of their faith in God that any
existence, even if it is an existence that is presently entirely erased,
can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the existences that
survive; it will be justified for ever in the modification it has
produced in them. They will find in themselves--it must be remembered I
am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as
a whole--a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in
order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will
all be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness
and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame
of their ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape the
schemes of their individual wills, will be the elaboration of that
future world state to which all things are pointing. They will not
conceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent
stagnation, but as a world state of active ampler human beings, full of
knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations,
the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of to-day, but
still struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrow
restrictions and for still more spacious objects than our vistas have
revealed. For that as a general end, for the special work that
contributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and the
limiting rules of their lives.

It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system, reconstructed in the
light of modern science and to meet the needs of such temperaments and
characters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together and develop,
will give very different values from those given by the existing systems
(if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of
conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very
clearly shown to be two--birth and death. All life is the effort of the
thing born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade
death, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping or
restriction, and to attain to effective procreation, to the victory of
another birth. Procreation is the triumph of the living being over
death; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, i