inger within us all we have
prepared; and the admirable will enter our soul, the volume of its
waters being as the depth of the channel that our expectation has
fashioned.

4. Is it necessary that we should conceive ourselves to be superior
to the universe? Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only
a feeble ray that has issued from Nature; a tiny atom of that whole
which Nature alone shall judge. Is it fitting that the ray of light
should desire to alter the lamp whence it springs?

That loftiness within us, from whose summit we venture to pass judgment
on the totality of life, to absolve or condemn it, is doubtless the
merest pin-prick, visible to our eye alone, on the illimitable sphere
of life. It is wise to think and to act as though all that happened to
man were all that man most required. It is not long ago--to cite only
one of the problems that the instinct of our planet is invited to
solve--that a scheme was on foot to inquire of the thinkers of Europe
whether it should rightly be held as a gain or a loss to mankind if an
energetic, strenuous, persistent race, which some, through prejudice
doubtless, still regard as inferior to the Aryan in qualities of heart
and of soul--if the Jews, in a word, were to vanish from the face of
the earth, or to acquire preponderance there. I am satisfied that the
sage might answer, without laying himself open to the charge of
indifference or undue resignation, "In what comes to pass will be
happiness." Many things happen that seem unjust to us; but of all the
achievements of reason there has been none so helpful as the discovery
of the loftier reason that underlies the misdeeds of nature. It is from
the slow and gradual vindication of the unknown force that we deemed at
first to be pitiless, that our moral and physical life has derived its
chief prop and support. If a race disappears that conforms with our
every ideal, it will be only because our ideal still falls short of the
grand ideal, which is, as we have said, the intimate truth of the
universe.

Our own experience has taught us that even in this world of reality
there exist dreams and desires, thoughts and feelings of beauty, of
justice, and love, that are of the noblest and loftiest. And if there
be any that shrink from the test of reality--in other words, from the
mysterious, nameless power of life--it follows that these must be
different, but not that their beauty is less, or their vastness, or
power to