nnitus in our ears. Like
God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to
snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution.
But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its
apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not
beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and
not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to
give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?

We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the most
oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in,
while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering
to the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between
its organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive
the higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the
suicide of the whole.

As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the germs
of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The
probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic
deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands
of years of pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon
a comet or gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing
cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed
in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs
containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others!
What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand
times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring
forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting
at long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory,
is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an
inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure
and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entanglements of an
inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee
and remake itself into the immortal image that is its God.

And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable
optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop
of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest
prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future
and destiny, there are others. Man, a