s a large garden. Yet every path
of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the
universe.

But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the records of
dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing new--nothing to
relieve man from the blessed necessity of eating his bread, intellectual
as well as material, in the sweat of his brow; and, perhaps more important
still, little to make the interests or responsibilities of this life
weaker because of any realized inferiority to those of a possible later
life.

It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you prefer, to
start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating us in knowledge
and character through labor and suffering, but at the same time throwing
open to our perceptions, from another life, a wider range of knowledge and
character attainable without labor or suffering.

I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who deny a plan
in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from Nature. It appears to
have been a part of that plan that for a long time past most of us should
"believe in" immortality, and that, at least until very lately, none of us
should know anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a
dangerous thing. So far we haven't all made a very good use of it. Many of
the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most with it, so
to speak, have largely transferred their interests to the other life, and
neglected and abused this one. "Other-worldliness" is a well-named vice,
and positive evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere
confidence in it.

All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if anything, is in
store for us beyond this life, it would be a self-destructive scheme of
things (or Scheme of Things, if you prefer) that would throw the future
life into farther competition with our interests here, at least before we
are farther evolved here. Looking at history by and large, we children
have not generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some
sort of capacity to handle them. If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or
Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would have blown
most of themselves and each other out of existence, and the rest back into
primitive savagery, and stayed there until the use of gunpowder became one
of the lost arts. But the new knowledge of evolution has given the modern
world