THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



world includes within itself fixed stars and milky 

 ways billions of miles distant. 



What are the stars? What is the whole? 

 What is the nature god? When man so ques- 

 tioned then life played its last part. Surround- 

 ed by danger, between the dragon of the ice age 

 and the typhoon of the desert god, there was 

 born of its environment, a being that for the 

 first time conquered cosmic adaptation. It 

 struggled on to higher ideas until it laid its 

 hand upon this whole earth and solved, and 

 triumphed over all those technical problems be- 

 fore which life had stood despairing through 

 millions of years but which to it were only 

 child's play. Man, the highest adjustment to 

 the earth, master of his planet through his tech- 

 nique — and this man now wandering in thought 

 through the whole star system and formulating 

 its laws — shall not life with this being yet 

 triumph through countless eons, over glowing 

 deserts, and ice ages, chilling suns and dissolv- 

 ing planets if in the incomprehensible length of 

 time, to thought and to desire is added the third 

 thing, deed? 



Now the kiss of the rising sun touches the 

 stone statue, that rises high over the desert. It 

 is the old statue of Memnon which, as the fable 

 tells us, sang when the sun touched it. Just so 

 the triumph of life is only a tone of a low 

 chord upon which the sun has played through 

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