is to
such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidal
mood--will then set in.

And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to
almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
living, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patience
with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
an unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it
then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and
lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free
to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that
is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf.
That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging
multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;
and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
intelligence,--events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
demands damages. The dog {58} may be present at every step of the
negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; and
he never _can_ know in his natural dog's life. Or take another case
which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider
a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped
on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single
redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
of th