HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 303 



perpetual motion has conducted us to a universal law of nature, which 

 radiates light into the distant nights of the beginning and of the end 

 of the history of the universe. To our own race it permits a long 

 but not an endless existence ; it threatens it with a day of judgment, 

 the dawn of which is still happily obscured. As each of us singly 

 must endure the thought of his death, the race must endure the same. 

 But above the forms of life gone by, the human race has higher moral 

 problems before it, the bearer of which it is, and in the completion 

 of which it fulfils its destiny. 



