ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



call the bad in thorns and weeds and reptiles? May 

 we not say that good is our good, and bad is our 

 bad, and that there is, and can be, no absolute good 

 and no absolute bad, any more than there can be 

 an absolute up or an absolute down? 



How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated 

 is all this business of the multiplication of the hu- 

 man race! What freaks, what failures, what mon- 

 strosities, what empty vessels, what deformed 

 limbs, what defective brains, what perverted in- 

 stincts! It is as if in the counsels of the Eternal it 

 had been decided to set going an evolutionary im- 

 pulse that should inevitably result in man, and then 

 leave him to fail or flourish just as the ten thousand 

 contingencies of the maelstrom of conflicting earth 

 forces should decide, so that whether a man be- 

 come a cripple or an athlete, a fool or a philoso- 

 pher, a satyr or a god, is largely a matter of chance. 

 Yet the human brain has steadily grown in size, hu- 

 man mastery over nature has steadily increased, and 

 chance has, upon the whole, brought more good to 

 man than evil. Optimism is a final trait of the Eter- 

 nal. 



And the taking-off of man, how haphazard, how 

 fortuitous it all is ! His years shall be threescore and 

 ten; but how few, comparatively, reach that age, 

 how few live out half their days ! Disease, accident, 

 stupidity, superstition, cut him off at all ages — in 

 infancy, in childhood, in youth, in manhood ; his 



102 



