APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 165 



graduated in all the faculties of human relationships ; 

 who has taken his share in all the deep joys and 

 deeper anxieties which cling- about them ; who has 

 felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, 

 and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss 

 of the eternal— has never had a thought beyond 

 negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that 

 such an one can have done his day's w^ork, always 

 with a light heart, with no sense of responsibility, 

 no terror of that which may appear when the 

 factitious veil of I sis — the thick web of fiction man 

 has woven round nature — is stripped off. 



CCCLXV 



If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as 

 the expression, in a way "to be understanded of the 

 people," of the total exclusion of chance from a place 

 even in the most insignificant corner of Nature, if it 

 means the strong conviction that the cosmic process 

 is rational, and the faith that, throughout all dura- 

 tion, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I 

 not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the 

 most important of all truths. As it if^ of more con- 

 sequence for a citizen to know the lav^r than to be 

 personally acquainted with the features of those who 

 will surely carry it into effect, so this very positive 

 doctrine of Providence, in the sense defined, seems to 

 me far more important than all the theorems of 

 speculative theology. If, further, the doctrine is 

 held to imply that, in some indefinitely remote past 

 aeon, the cosmic process was set going by some 

 entity possessed of intelligence and foresight, similar 

 to our own in kind, however superior in degree, 

 if, consequently, it is held that every event, not 

 merely in our planetary speck, but in untold millions 

 of other worlds, was foreknown before these worlds 

 were, scientific thought, so far as I know anything 

 about it, has nothing to say about that hypothesis. 



