I WAS standing by the sea-wall, watching the green water foaming round the stakes of the breakwater, when my companion, a charming and elegant woman, turned to me:

“What is there in water that fascinates one?” she asked.

“Do you feel the fascination?”

“Yes.”

“Do you not know why you feel it?”

“No.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you were once a swimming reptile.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, there is nothing to thank me for, though the fact is the most glorious in the universe.”

“The fact that I was once a reptile?”

“Precisely.”

She pondered on this for a moment, and then:

“I don’t see where the glory comes in,” said she.

“Nevertheless, it is there, for the fact is the master key to the meaning of the universe, the one light that shines in a world of darkness, and the one sure hope in a world of doubt.”

“The fact that I was once a reptile?”

“And I—yes. I would not give what the webbing between my fingers tells me for all the promises of all the religions of all the countries on earth.”

“Ancestral pride is evidently not your strong point.”

“I don’t know about that; but up to a year ago mental darkness was my portion. I had no religion.”

“And have you any now?”

“No, but I have a certainty.”

“Of what?”

“Of the fact that the world has a meaning and life an aim. Shall we sit down on this seat and talk for a while, if I am not boring you?—and may I light a cigarette?”

“You are not boring me—yet. And if you can prove what you say, I shall not mind even if you bore me. But I must tell you, first of all, that, to me, the world seems absolutely without a meaning and life without an aim. I mean, of course, the general life of the world, which implies, as far as I can see, general suffering. If suffering did people good, then I could understand that we were placed here to grow and develop; but suffering and poverty, as far as I can see, only stunt and twist and spoil everything they touch.”

“Precisely.”

“Then, if you admit that, you must admit that the meaning and aim of the world is far from being glorious.”

“Never. That is what I wish to disprove.”

“Then disprove it.”

^“TELL me,” I said. “Why is it that an ordinary human being placed before a flower sees only a flower and nothing of the wonder that is in it?”

“Because flowers are so common.”

“More than that—because a flower is of such slow growth. If one could see a seed sprouting, a stalk rising, a bud forming, bursting, and expanding all in five minutes, the wonder of the thing would bring one on one’s knees. The world is just the same. We do not see the splendour and magnificence and meaning of it, because the growth has been so slow, because every-day jargon has blinded our eyes, and scientific jargon has dulled the poetic perception of the miracle in its entirety. It is by looking at bits of the world that men have come to confusion, instead of fixing their eyes on the world from its very beginning.”

“Ah, but who can do that?”

“You can, and so can I, and so can anyone who has studied the development of the world from the very beginning.”

“But I have never studied the development of the world.”

“Well, then it is high time you began; and to assist you in your studies, I will give you a vague sketch of the facts, and when I have sketched those facts, I will expound to you in a few words the deduction which I draw from them and the reason why I have implicit faith that earth has a meaning and life an aim—both equally glorious.

“Now, mind, I have nothing to do with fancies, only facts. Hard, dry facts that no one can refuse.”

“First, then, before the beginning of time there was neither sun, moon, nor planets; the whole of the solar system was a zone of incandescent gas.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it because all philosophy points to it, and because in the depths of space the telescope shews to me hundreds of solar systems in the process of making. Perhaps you will take my word for the fact.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“This sea of gas, floating lost in the universe, was possessed of two movements: the movement of the atoms buzzing round each other, and a movement of rotation by which the whole sea whirled round its central point. Millions of years went by, and during those years our gaseous sea began to cool and shrink. But it did not shrink evenly. The great outer ring of the sea was left behind, still whirling and cooling and condensing, but it did not remain in the form of a ring. The atoms drew together, sucked toward a common point from every part of the ring, and the result was that a globe began to form like a great tumour on the attenuated ring; and as years went on, the ring gave up more and more atoms to the globe, till at last there was nothing left but the globe whirling along the path once occupied by the ring. This globe was the first and outermost planet, Neptune.

“Meanwhile, the sea of gas was still contracting, and again the same thing happened. The outermost edge of the sea was left behind, in the form of a ring, a globe was formed and that globe was Uranus, the second furthest planet from us. Again the same thing happened, and Saturn was formed: and yet again, and Jupiter was formed: and yet again, and Mars was left behind in the shape of a whirling globe of fire, and then the Earth.

“The sea continued contracting, leaving Venus behind and then Mercury; and still it continued contracting, but now it was too small to throw off any more rings, and it consolidated to form one great central globe, the sun.

“The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of space.

“The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything. Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music, hunger, and cruelty.

“That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too—from the daisy to the hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves.

“From the first moment of its separate existence this world in posse, consisting as yet of incandescent vapour, began to cool and shrink, and after the first million years or so it began to exhibit the first symptoms of thought and to storm at its own shrinking.”

“Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of thought?”

“The first and only symptom of thought is action, arising from opposing forces, and when the world, now condensed into a liquid form, began to exhibit tides and storms of molten matter, it began to exhibit action arising from opposing forces; and here let me say that the amount of work done by the world before life ever appeared upon it, the amount of work done by what we call senseless matter, and the amount of thought and ingenuity expended on that work put the much trumpeted wonder of life in the shade.

“Long, long before the first germ of life began to form, matter in its own mind had worked out the problem of the mountains and the seas; matter had kneaded the moon in its ‘dull’ hands and flung it up into the sky to be a lamp and a tide-maker; matter had worked out the whole problem of lighting and watering and warming the earth, so that when life appeared in its first humble and rudimentary form, it found a house built for it, water laid on for it, and all the lighting arrangements perfect.

“Yes, to me, sometimes, all that work done by matter on its own account is even more wonderful than all the work done by Life, for even had life never appeared on the world, the labours of ‘dull matter’ and ‘brute force’ would still have created the house of the earth.”

“It was created for Life to live in?”

“I do not think so. I think the creation of the world was the result of the first vague struggle of the spirit of matter toward higher things. The senseless ferocity of blazing gas had calmed down, and the mind of matter, if I may use the term, had reached the dignity of expressing itself in form; and you will mark that the advance toward higher things was on the road from ferocity to kindliness; that the triumph of matter was not so much in the creation of the forms of hills and plains and mountains and seas from whirling oceans of molten material, as in the creation of those conditions of mildness necessary for the existence of life.

“Yes, before life ever appeared, matter had developed abstract qualities, the benign had separated itself from the malignant, and, under the influence of the benign, Life first peeped out.

“We date everything from that first budding of matter into what we call life. Yet in reality it was the last stage of a long journey, the last act of a long series of actions and reactions, the last triumph of benignity over ferocity in the first stage of the evolution of the world.”

“What do you mean by Benignity?”

“I use the word Benignity for all that makes for development of the simple into the complex, and the word Malignity for all that retards it. I will use the words Good and Evil if you like them better, and say that Good in those days was anything that helped forward the evolution of matter, Evil anything that retarded it. The sunray falling on the first jelly-fish was good, the storm that injured it was evil; and Good was good just because it enabled matter to build one storey higher, and Evil was evil just because it tried to pull that storey down.

“Now you have followed me from the very beginning of the world to the first beginnings of life. Have I impressed you logically with one simple fact, that the journey of atoms from a mass of blazing gas to a world where life was just beginning to bud was along one path, and one path only, the path of development?”

“Of course it was.”

“And of the other fact are you equally assured?—that the journey from a whirling lava storm to a solid world of comparatively quiet seas and hills and plains and mountains was a glorious journey and a benign?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will start with matter on the new journey on which it set forth a million million years ago, using for its carriage the first jelly-fish.”

^“IT had laboured dimly to form the hills, the plains, and the seas, but that part of it which had laboured to form the seas, now that they were formed, found something more to do, found itself developing in a new and strange direction—that of life.

“The energy of matter that had already constructed the solar system and had evolved the rocks and the sea found itself at last held up, cribbed, cabined and confined, with nothing to do.

“Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy, which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.—And, in parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and find its field in a world as yet unknown.

“However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry, nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed their home.

“To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively formed the mould in which life was cast.

“Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just hinted what the brain can scarcely guess—the scenes of fiery storm and horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very path that the hills and the seas came along in their making—the path from negation and through ferocity to the benign.

“Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming reptile,—just as you were—devouring other reptiles, is a fact that I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning.

“And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock, from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit; and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that, and nothing can be more definitely proved. There is no use at all in fixing your eyes on the Jurassic period and saying, ‘What monsters are here!’ or on a London slum and saying, ‘How terrible life is! It can have no meaning!’ There is no use in fixing your eyes on a thousand years of history and saying, ‘I see no development. Men were as good then as they are now.’ You must take a billion years in your purview, to see the amazing and glorious thing as it is, and then what you will see will be strangely like the growth and unfolding of a flower—or the flowering of a bramble.”

^“I BELIEVE in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day, is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity, Good, and Gentleness. Let us call it by the great good word that embraces all these things: Good. Well, then, the world, since the beginning, has grown toward Good.”

“Do you deny the soul?”

“I do not. I know nothing about it. I am quite content to live in a world that is slowly and steadily developing in benignity, and to assist that development in my small way by trying to develop the benignity in myself.

“I do not trouble about my soul one iota, but I am deeply concerned to keep on that upward path along which earth is ascending.”

“Ah, but how can one do that?”

“By copying what the earth has done; by freeing oneself as much as possible from ferocity, hatred, lust, and cruelty.”

“But you are neither ferocious nor cruel?”

“Perhaps not actively, but just as I carry in my material brain the eye of the extinct monster I once was, so do I carry in my mind the remnants of the passions of the reptile that once was me, the lust of the reptile and the hatred. I do not tear other human beings with my teeth, but I have torn them by deeds and words. I have been cruel—who has not? lustful—who has not? inspired by hatred—who has not? I have regretted these things—who has not?—and forgotten them—who has not?”

“But since I have taken a broad view of the world, since I have seen that all these things are part and parcel of the malignity from which earth is freeing herself in her journey toward the Benign, I have come to hate those things as a man on the road to some brilliant festival might hate the obstacles on his path.”

“But since you have no surety that you possess an individual soul, you have no surety of ever reaching the festival.”

“I cannot help that. My immediate aim is to keep up with the procession. I leave the rest to chance.”

^“ALL that,” said she, “seems true. No one can deny that the world has developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn’t it? With all its brains on the outside.”

“Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain developed.

“A hundred—or shall we say eighty?—years ago, the brain of the world consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism.

“This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there were men in the world—now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of the saurian to the brain of the civilised man?

“What do we find?

“We find that the development of the universal brain has followed in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth century.

“To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the train—that is to say, by the universalisation of thought.

“A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages. Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless. Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part of the universal brain.

“What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris. The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town. A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence. And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth from fire, and of life from earth.

“There have been, in fact, three creations. The creation of the material earth; the creation of life, which reached its ultimate form in men; and the creation of Man from the scattered tribes of men. Man the giant (whose brain extends to China and Peru, and which will eventually include China and Peru), and who feels in the London part of his brain a pain that exists in the Congo or Putumayo part of his brain. Man, who, though a giant, is still in his infancy and who, when he has reached his teens, will be a much more perfect being than he is now.

“Ah, but will he?”

“Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still; and until among them are seen the first vague forms of men.

“Then look at these forms of men, how steadily they have advanced in perfection and toward the good. Steadily, I say, though at times the advance has been set back for perhaps a thousand years—till the highest development of individual man was reached. That is to say, the highest development that men could reach toward the good as individual entities.

“Then what happened? From purely material causes all these individual entities have become, or are becoming, fused into one great universal entity. The struggle of the world spirit to higher things found itself held up by the individual brain, just as before the birth of organic life it found itself held up by the limits of the inorganic world. It burst that boundary, and now it has burst the narrow limit imposed by the individual mind and has found a new outlet for its energies in the mind universal.

“And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the individual men it has taken into its great keeping.

“Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and cruelty.

“Since Man has arisen, he has taken war in his hand; he is weighing it and finding it wanting. He has taken superstition and is pulling its vile wings off. He is taking the unjust magistrate by his shoulders and shewing him the door; and he has put his heel on the tyrant king. He is freeing the individual man from the odious idea that the individual man is made of mud, to be burnt forever in hell if there is a flaw in his making. And he has taught humanity at large that it is an infamous thing to hang a poor devil for the theft of a sheep.

“Man is only a hundred years old, and he has done all that since his birth.

“The world spirit has been only a hundred years on this new path of development. Can you doubt, then, seeing its progression during a billion years, and how it has spread over ever new fields, that it will continue so to progress and so to spread into fields newer still?”

“I can not.”

^“YOU are a philosopher,” she said.

“No. I am a man who is sick of philosophy, at least transcendental philosophy. I want matter under my feet all the time. Philosophers make me giddy, swinging like spiders on threads over abysms of nothing, and weaving words into webs to catch—words which they mistake for thoughts.

“I am sick of religious theories, doctrines and dogmas, and gods. I want Truth that a plain man can understand. I never could understand the Christian creed as distinct from the teachings of Christ, and, what is more, I believe no one else can. Mahommedanism revolts me. Buddhism attracts me, yet I feel it to be as unfeeding to the truth-craving part of my nature as a soap-bubble to a starving man. Materialism that denies a god revolts me.”

“But you say you are sick of gods.”

“Yes, but I am more sick of materialists—all the rest of the religions are pretty much the same; they don’t satisfy me. Nothing has ever satisfied me but the faith I have struck out for myself and the philosophy that a little child can understand.”

“And that faith?”

“Is simply in the essential goodness of the world. That is what I have been driving at all the time since we began our conversation.”

“But doesn’t Christianity believe in that?”

“No; Christianity believes in the essential badness of the world.”

“Of course!—I forgot. All men are sinners.”

“Yes, that’s it. Christianity believes that the world is bad to the core, and yet it believes that a God Who is all goodness made man right at once and thoroughly bad; left him in this condition for an indefinite time, and then sent His son down to redeem him.

“Now, I have a great reverence for other people’s religious beliefs, but I have a greater reverence for honest thought, and I cannot—though I worship Christ—believe that the world followed that line of development.”

“You worship Christ, yet you deny him!”

“No—I worship Christ because He was entirely lovable. He shines entirely alone in the world of the Western peoples, just as Buddha shines in the world of the Eastern. He was goodness itself made visible and audible. I worship all I can understand of Him. I cannot worship Him as a mystical figure sent suddenly to earth to be put to a cruel death in order that I might be saved, simply because my brain cannot understand that process and proceeding, and I cannot worship what I cannot understand. It is my defect, perhaps, but that defect is shared by numerous people.

“And I speak for those people when I say that faith with us is impossible unless based on a sure foundation of reason; that we must understand before we can worship, that we do not deny God, but that we do not see Him, and that if He, the maker of the world, does exist as an individual entity, we have implicit faith that He is the fountain and origin of all goodness, and that goodness is His robe; that we worship goodness and humbly believe that if He does exist beyond the ken of our purblind eyes, He takes our worship of His robe as homage to Himself far more profound than homage exacted by fear or by superstition, and equal to the homage which great and saintly souls lay at His feet by virtue, perhaps, of their truer sight of Him.

“But we deny, utterly, the essential badness of man, and our denial is based on the sure fact that as man grows in stature, so, pari passu, he grows in goodness. We believe that man, unaided by miracles, can increase in goodness just by the virtue of the goodness that is in life, a seed in the cave man, a flower in the civilised; we believe that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have produced better ethical result than all the teaching of the Apostles, simply because those great fibres of communication have enabled men to develop by mutual touch and the good in each individual man to rush upward and find a vast field of new growth in the field of universal good, a field that shines now, like a star galaxy above the hell of darkness of a hundred years ago.

“We believe that the minds of men, like the bodies of men, are filled with old left-offs and fissures, and that just as some men are born with the gills of fishes, through whose forms their beings once passed, so some men are born with the thoughts of the reptiles they once were, and that the hells of the priests and the sensuous and painted heavens, the asceticism that kills joy, the persecutions and mutilations, and mummeries and terrors under which men have groaned for two thousand years have arisen, not from Religion, but from old defects in the mind of man equivalent to defects in his body, like, for instance, the vermiform appendix. These defects have taken the good food that Christ gave the mind of man and turned it, not into nourishment, but into causes of inflammation. Saurian hatred is bound up with Religion; superstitions from the time of the cave men, a spirit of simian persecution from the times of the tree men, and lust; all these vile left-overs clinging to the mind of the individual man, as the Pineal eye and vermiform appendix cling to his body, have made Religion an impossible food for the advancement of ethics beyond a certain point.

“Now mark this. The universal mind knows not lust; hates persecution; abhors cruelty, and is preparing to free itself from superstition.

“How do I prove this? Take the press of the civilised world, which is an expression of the universal mind. Where is the place of lust there? Where is the place of Cruelty? Where is the place of Hate? Where is the place of Tyranny? I tell you this, that the mind universal is as far above the mind individual as the mind of a man is above the mind of a chimpanzee—in ethics.

“An ordinary man dare not advance into the pure world of the mind universal one half of the thoughts, nay, one-fourth of the thoughts that fill his individual mind. He dare not preach the hatred that is in him or shew the lust that is in him, or the spirit of persecution, or even the spirit of intolerance; and the restraint upon him is not so much the fear of the police, or the fear of public censure, as a certain recognition in his own soul of ethical values and an instinctive horror of putting forth into pure light his deformities,—a recognition, in short, of the essential goodness of the world. Of course there are extraordinary men not so affected—so are there murderers and thieves.

“Now, I wish to be perfectly explicit about Religion, or, rather, about the new Religion which the world has received from Man. The new Religion which has advanced the world more in a hundred years than all the priest-ridden religions advanced it since the dawn of Time.

“Its miraculous qualities arise from one fundamental fact. It knows not Individualism.

“It is a simple recognition of fundamental Rights. It is not the individual laying down the law for other individuals (as in the churches); it is the universe of Man recognising the laws that brought it into being, and imposing those laws on the individual. It does not teach; it accepts.

“The great teachers of the world laid down precepts, they formulated rules of conduct, and their scholars took precepts and formulÆ and boiled men alive with them for coining, and hanged men with them for stealing, and burned women with them for witchcraft, and persecuted men with them for making the sign of the cross—or not making it, and twisted and bedevilled those precepts and formulÆ into every shape that an individual mind could imagine.

“The new Religion does not discard these precepts.

“Its decalogue, in fact, is longer and more highly developed in parts than the old, but it does not preach its laws, it breathes them and lives by them.

“More than that: it lives by the spirit of good, not by the letter.

“The universal mind, for instance, denounces Theft, yet it recognizes that theft is a multifaced thing, some faces being almost innocent, others hideously cruel. A hundred years ago, a thief had only one face, one head, and one neck, by which he was hanged, if the theft amounted to more than—six-and-eightpence, was it?

“—So, to come to the end of the matter, we have evolved a secular morality that knows no more of creeds, or threats of future punishments, or promises of future bliss than I know of Hindustanee; which lives above all men, yet touches all men; which abhors lust and cruelty and oppression; which teaches the kindness of Christ to men and of Buddha to animals, and before which Atheists and Christians, Jews and Gentiles all bow. A morality which, by the influence of the press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine, those three Apostles, will spread to the uttermost depth of China and to the last temple of that hideous black blot, India; and which, in the course of ages, will change the individual brain of man and raise it ethically far above its present advanced position. No; development has not ceased. Development has only begun. Give the world a thousand years more.”

“A thousand years!”

“I do not want to be unduly optimistical. I foresee set-backs even in the world of universal thought. Give it a thousand years under this new influence, and I foresee Man, individual man, on the heights immeasurably above us.”

“And then?”

“And then—who knows? The world spirit that has reached so many limits, and broken through them to higher things, will reach the limit of perfection in man. If there is a field of perfection beyond, it will break those limits and flow on.”

“And if there is no field beyond?”

“Then this whole business would be as senseless as a farce by M. Crebillon the younger—whom I hope you have never read.”