COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



become slowly moulded into harmony with the 

 coexistent desires of neighbouring individuals. 

 But as cataclysms and miracles and sudden cre- 

 ations have no place in our purely dynamical 

 theory of things, we do not expect to see this 

 ultimate state of society realized within half 

 a century. We know full well that it can be 

 realized only in the indefinitely remote future. 

 Nay, since the conception of absolute finality is 

 as inconsistent with the Doctrine of Evolution 

 as is the conception of absolute beginning, we 

 do not regard it as destined ever to be abso- 

 lutely realized. That supreme epoch of social 

 equilibrium in which every man shall love the 

 Lord with all his heart and his neighbour even 

 as himself, in which the beast shall have been 

 worked out, and, in Tennyson's phrase, the ape 

 and the tiger shall have been allowed to die 

 within us, in which egoistic or anti-social im- 

 pulses shall be self-restrained, and every one 

 shall spontaneously do that which tends towards 

 the general happiness, — this supreme epoch is 

 likely forever to remain an ideal epoch which 

 shall relatively be more and more distinctly 

 realized without ever being reahzed absolutely, 

 just as the hyperbola forever approaches its 

 asymptote without coming in contact with it. 

 There will always be room left for that aspira- 

 tion after a yet higher fulness of life, after a 

 " closer walk with God," which, whether it be 

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