he
sheet-anchor aforesaid. The majority of mankind believe, and will
continue to believe, most staunchly in what they wish to believe. Yet
this tendency on our part--visible as it often is in directions where we
should least expect to find it--does not necessarily prove our beliefs
false, while it also leads us not infrequently direct to truths, however
unorthodox our course may have appeared to lookers-on.

In considering, then, the question of the possible future existence of
our canine friends, the dominant feeling is commonly this: We believe
that a future, in great probability, exists for them, because we feel
that not to believe this would be to turn the whole scheme of the
universe, as we understand it, into one little short of nonsense. We do
not stop to reason: such things are because they must be; they cannot
cease to be without total disfigurement of the plan of our conception.
Intuition points, and almost impulsively perhaps, in one direction. There
is "an intelligent Author of Nature or Natural Governor of the world."
Life is not made up of haphazards. Eventually there will be happiness in
completest form: otherwise there would be injustice, and of this, life,
as we know it, affords little or no evidence. For happiness to be
complete, there can be no question of the songs we are to hear being
indifferently harmonised, there can be no rifts in the lute: in a state
of perfection imperfections must necessarily be imperceptible.

With our narrow, human limitations we are driven to conclusions naturally
circumscribed and coloured by those limitations. We are cognisant of the
narrowness of the field of vision allowed us, and we are perpetually made
aware that we are beating our wings against the bars; but we nevertheless
accept this or that conclusion because it satisfies our souls, or we
refuse to accept it because we cannot honestly confess that it does so.
Yet, once again, behind both acceptance and rejection there is something
further--that intuition and power of perception that enable us to find
satisfaction in inferences that we know lie outside questions of faith,
but which we nevertheless feel to be true. And the very fact that we are
enabled to derive this satisfaction and to feel that our conclusions have
an element of truth in them tends to confirm us, rightly or wrongly, in
our conjectures.

Thus we come deliberately to the opinion that dogs will have a place in
the land over the border. Such an opi