674 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
First Cause is not only omnipotent, but all-wise and beneficent. 
For evolution tends to optimism. Few working biologists are 
pessimistic. And thus, while science as such is concerned with 
facts and their relations, we can, at the end of this century of 
scientific effort, affirm that it need not be and is not opposed 
to whatever is noble, exalted, hopeful, and inspiring in human 
aspirations, or to the yearnings of the soul for a life beyond 
the present ; for there certainly are, in the facts of the moral 
and spiritual evolution of our race, intimations of immortality, 
and suggestions, where absolute proof is naturally wanting, of 
a divinity that shapes the course of nature, 
