have foreseen and
reckoned upon. All these considerations must be taken into account
when we try to sum up the responsibility of an organizer and director
of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the
conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of
any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business.

[2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _God the
Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.

"But sympathy!" it may be said--"You have left sympathy out of the
reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad
egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our
own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the
frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy
and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of
"individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our
environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the
trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their
pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can
relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points,
doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but
neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor
registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was
necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit
should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been
able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could
actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own,
life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an
imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social
value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own
universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama,
the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before
us.

In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are inclined to give way to
certain morbid and sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do
some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment
assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much
concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of
nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and
jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless s