remains outside of
everybody else's sight.

Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.

Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]

[T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.

In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only div