aimlessness, and is dimly conscious
that he is working with great and
constant efforts, and without any idea towards
what end those efforts are directed, then
descends on him the misery of nineteenth-century
thought. He is lost and bewildered,
and without hope. He becomes sceptical, disillusioned,
weary, and asks the apparently
unanswerable question whether it is indeed
worth while to draw his breath for such
unknown and seemingly unknowable results.
But are these results unknowable? At least, to
ask a lesser question, is it impossible to make a
guess as to the direction in which our goal lies?

III

This question, born of sadness and weariness,
which seems to us essentially part of the
spirit of the nineteenth century, is in fact a
question which must have been asked all
through the ages. Could we go back throughout
history intelligently, no doubt we should
find that it came always with the hour when
the flower of civilization had blown to its
full, and when its petals were but slackly held
together. The natural part of man has
reached then its utmost height; he has rolled
the stone up the Hill of Difficulty only to watch
it roll back again when the summit is reached,--as
in Egypt, in Rome, in Greece. Why this
useless labor? Is it not enough to produce a
weariness and sickness unutterable, to be forever
accomplishing a task only to see it undone
again? Yet that is what man has done throughout
history, so far as our limited knowledge
reaches. There is one summit to which, by
immense and united efforts, he attains, where
there is a great and brilliant efflorescence of all
the intellectual, mental, and material part of
his nature. The climax of sensuous perfection
is reached, and then his hold weakens, his
power grows less, and he falls back, through
despondency and satiety, to barbarism. Why
does he not stay on this hill-top he has
reached, and look away to the mountains
beyond, and resolve to scale those greater
heights? Because he is ignorant, and seeing
a great glittering in the distance, drops his
eyes bewildered and dazzled, and goes back
for rest to the shadowy side of his familiar
hill. Yet there is now and then one brave
enough to gaze fixedly on this glittering, and
to decipher something of the shape within it.
Poets and philosophers, thinkers and teachers,--all
those who are the "elder brothers of the
race,"--have beheld this sight from time to
time, and some among them have recognis