say that when we express our confidence
that the North Western Railway will carry us to Manchester, we thereby
imply the belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It is quite
possible--any one who is so minded may say it is quite probable--that
progress means advance towards disillusion. What we are sure of is
merely this: that life may be, and ought to be, a very different thing
from what it now is, and that it is in our own power to make it so. We
have not the least doubt that the generations which come after us will
say:--

We will not cease from mortal strife,
Nor shall the sword slip from our hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

But whether, when they have built it, they will think Jerusalem worth
the building is quite a different matter. It may be that Leopardi was
right when he said, "Men are miserable by necessity, but resolute in
believing themselves to be miserable by accident." That is a
proposition which the individual can accept or reject so far as his
own little span is concerned, but on which the race, as such, can pass
no valid judgment. Life has never had a fair chance. It has always
been so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that no man can say
what life, in its ultimate essence, really is. All we know is that
many of its miseries are factitious, inessential, eminently curable;
and till these are eradicated, how are we to determine whether there
are other evils too deep-rooted for our surgery? It may be, for
example, that the elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum for
Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide this _a priori_? Let us
learn what are the true potentialities of life before we undertake to
declare whether it is worth living or not.

Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point some words of my own
which express the idea I am trying to convey as clearly as I am
capable of putting it. They are part of the last paragraph of an
address entitled _Knowledge and Character: The Straight Road in
Education_:[5]

The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the
innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the
theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man
would never have been man; he would only have been one more
species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe,
the reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But
somehow and somewhere