THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



a stage of culture that shall fully recognize in practice, 

 what is already admitted in theory, that law, not 

 chance, rules the world. 



It is much, I repeat, that you are half ashamed of 

 your superstitions. You differ to that extent from the 

 old Babylonian. That is well, as far as it goes. But 

 it does not go far enough. You should be not merely 

 half ashamed, but wholly ashamed of these anachro- 

 nistic ideas. An accident of birth has placed you in the 

 world in an age when, for the first time in human 

 history, all the ghosts have been given quietus have 

 been explained away, banished back to dreamland 

 whence they came. A thousand pities, then, that you 

 should choose to revert to a dead past, to shrink from 

 the light, to seek out the musty realms of terror-haunted 

 ghost-land. 



Far more conducive to your happiness would it be 

 to strive to live in the world of to-day; to endeavor 

 to be really awake while you are not sleeping, and to 

 forget the dreams which the sleep-state thrusts upon 

 you; turning your back inexorably upon that unsub- 

 stantial pageant which your primordial ancestors sum- 

 moned into human society to the infinite detriment 

 of mankind out of the land of nod. 



[328] 



