isease, and who yet might be a thoroughgoing optimist with
regard to the future of humanity. Nothing in the world could be so
indicative of the rise in the moral and emotional temperature of the
world as the fact that men are increasingly disposed to sacrifice their
own ambitions and their own comfort for the sake of others, and are
willing to suffer, if the happiness of the race may be increased; and
much of the pessimism that prevails is the pessimism of egotists and
individualists, who feel no interest in the rising tide, because it does
not promise to themselves any increase in personal satisfaction. No
man can possibly hold the continuance of personal identity to be an
indisputable fact, because there is no sort of direct evidence on the
subject; and indeed all the evidence that exists is rather against the
belief than for it. The belief is in reality based upon nothing but
instinct and desire, and the impossibility of conceiving of life as
existing apart from one's own perception. But even if a man cannot hold
that it is in any sense a certainty, he may cherish a hope that it is
true, and he may be generously and sincerely grateful for having been
allowed to taste, through the medium of personal consciousness, the
marvellous experience of the beauty and interest of life, its emotions,
its relationships, its infinite yearnings, even though the curtain may
descend upon his own consciousness of it, and he himself may become as
though he had never been, his vitality blended afresh in the vitality
of the world, just as the body of his life, so near to him, so seemingly
his own, will undoubtedly be fused and blent afresh in the sum of
matter. A man, even though racked with pain and tortured with anxiety,
may deliberately and resolutely throw himself into sympathy with
the mighty will of God, and cherish this noble and awe-inspiring
thought--the thought of the onward march of humanity; righting wrongs,
amending errors, fighting patiently against pain and evil, until
perhaps, far-off and incredibly remote, our successors and descendants,
linked indeed with us in body and soul alike, may enjoy that peace
and tranquillity, that harmony of soul, which we ourselves can only
momentarily and transitorily obtain.

XVII. JOY

Dr. Arnold somewhere says that the schoolmaster's experience of being
continually in the presence of the hard mechanical high spirits of
boyhood is an essentially depressing thing. It seemed to him