Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/270

Rh give support to thy moral needs so long as the temperature of thy earth crust is high enough to prevent thy oceans from being absorbed, so long as the radiant heat of the sun is given out in sufficient quantities to keep thee warm. When the next stage is reached, I propose to freeze and to dry thy fair home and all thy moral needs, until there shall be nothing found on thy planet lovelier than the ruined crags of thy hills as they glimmer in the last red rays of a torpid sun. What is thy progress to me?” Notice then where our real difficulty lies. The aspect of the facts that we now mean is this. It is not because progress is to endure on this planet for a short or for a long time, but because the world in which this progress is so to end seems, thus regarded, wholly indifferent to progress, — this is the gloomy aspect. To-day, even while progress is so swift and sure, at this moment, we are living in a world for which, as science displays it to us, this progress is as indifferent and unessential as the fleeting hues of an evaporating soap-bubble. Is the physical fact of progress, thus regarded, a moral help to us?

Yet men turn away from these plain and often-mentioned facts to all sorts of fantastic dreams of a coming golden age. They make of future humanity a saintly people, living in devotion, or a merry people, always dancing to waltzes yet undreamt of, or a scientific people, calculating by some higher algebra the relative positions and motions of the molecules in the rocks on the other side of the moon. Every dream of progress is to be realized in that blessed