and that he voluntarily, and in full
view of the consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms from
which consciousness arose. He could have let it alone, he could have
suffered life to remain an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the
fire in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the flint and
steel and kindled the torch which was to be handed on, not only from
generation to generation, but from species to species, through all the
stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable ascent. If we accept
this hypothesis, can we acquit the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we
view his action with approval, even with gratitude? Or must we, like
Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an outlet for religious emotion,
postulate another, subsequent, intermeddling Power--like, say, an
American consul at the scene of the Turkish massacre--wholly guiltless
of the disaster of life, and doing his little best to mitigate and
remedy it?

In the present state of our knowledge, it is certainly very difficult
to see how the kindler of the _vitai lampada_, supposing him to have
been responsible for his actions, can claim from a jury of human
beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But we can, even now, see
certain extenuating circumstances, which evidence not yet available
may one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable him to leave the
Court without a stain on his character.

For one thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of
magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable
insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness
of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between
the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience,
that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal
carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is
it all," we say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million
million of suns?" We feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless
giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail
wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of
fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or
the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an
elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable
disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the
well-known sonnet:--

Know you, my friend, the