most of us: a
little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss
of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the
pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual
springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy
metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel.
It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld.
Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life,
however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.

This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic,
or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness
do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring
and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought
of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life
of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any
present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it
stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of
its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it
may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man,
sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine
at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors
have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all
these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their
brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.

The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background
of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped
in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal
significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their
visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes
in;--and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they
thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the
curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for
pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are
all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns
rather to an anxious trembling.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in
a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake,
surrounded by cliffs over whi