78 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



far from being the melancholy and terrible thing which 

 their masters have painted it, this much we must concede 

 to the genuine pessimist that up to the present hour, 

 although human nature has been widened and deepened 

 on all sides sufficient (as we who are not pessimists con- 

 tend) to give promises and glimpses of its glorious further 

 possibilities, which a fortunate few seem even now to 

 realize, yet it must be confessed that the net result in 

 happiness realized by our species is somehow disappoint- 

 ingly small. Though a few in whom the elements have 

 been more genially mixed find a high flavour in life, yet 

 men in general, even men of the selecter races and nations, 

 nay, even the most highly gifted specimens of men, do 

 not seem to find a large overbalance of happiness or 

 satisfaction in life. For the most part, men have not yet 

 been able to live and enjoy the higher, or to secure the 

 happier life which has been promised and shown to be 

 possible. They have not yet been permitted by destiny 

 to enter in and take possession of the land of promise 

 foreshadowed by Science, which it now seems, according 

 to Herbert Spencer, the prophet of evolution, is to be 

 reserved for our happier but remote posterity the elect 

 of a more prolonged natural selection. 



However the prophecy may turn out, certain it is 

 that we in the mean time have most of us largely missed 

 an amount of happiness that was possible to us, nay, that 

 was near to us and within our grasp. As Bishop Butler 

 suggests, perhaps every one has missed a degree of happi- 

 ness that he might have attained. How far this fatal 

 result may be owing to the obstinate and over-large 

 claims of sense and self, already alluded to ; how far to 

 the cares and crosses and shocks of chance, incidental to 

 all individual life ; how far it may be due to some deep 

 and essential and irrevocable contradictions in things, or 



