become subject to
a magician's "presto"? Are we not decked in the whole of color, feasted on
all that shape and sound and flavor can give? Are we not wiser each moment
than we were the moment before? Do not the blind see, the deaf hear, and
the crippled dance? Has not Nature surrendered to us? Art and science, are
they not our slaves,--coining money and running mills? Have we not built
and multiplied religions, till each man, even the most irreligious, can
have his own? Is not what is called the "movement of the age" going on at
the highest rate of speed and of sound? Shall we complain that we are
maddened by the racket, out of breath with the spinning and whirling, and
dying of the strain of it all? What is a man, more or less? What are one
hundred and twenty millions of men, more or less? What is quiet in
comparison with riches? or digestion and long life in comparison with
knowledge? When we are added up in the universal reckoning of races, there
will be small mention of individuals. Let us be disinterested. Let us
sacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the general
average of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark. To
be sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we are
Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall
ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below us
stand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning to
turn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we have
brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously
appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let
us never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and envious
misgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of the
Creator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of all
which created intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best of
dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children. Perhaps we
can do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could in
seventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children that
live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers.
It is a comfort to believe, as we are told, that the world can never lose
an iota that it has gained; that progress is the great law of the
universe. It is consoling to verify this truth by looking backward, and
s