ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



time be effaced, so its effect upon the life of the 

 states and communities will fade and be a memory 

 only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less de- 

 plorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes, 

 of depleted treasures, will long continue. 



Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is 

 an end in itself. Many things are inimical to us, and 

 we are equally inimical to many things. We lay the 

 whole of Nature under contribution so far as we can, 

 and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as 

 we can, but the world was no more made for man 

 than it was made for mice and midges. When we see 

 how irrespective of us the natural forces go their 

 way, that we can ride them and guide them only as 

 we do wild horses — by being quicker and more 

 masterful than they are — when we know that they 

 will tread us down with the same indifference that 

 we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts 

 should temper and modify our egotism. When we 

 look into the depths of merely our own solar system, 

 and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so 

 much older and greater than our little earth, and 

 not yet the abode of any form of life, and probably 

 not within millions of years of such a state, how 

 casual and insignificant man seems ! How far from 

 being the end and object of creation ! 



Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole 

 systems of worlds in the depths of sidereal space 

 upon which life has never appeared, and number- 



34 



