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 no ESSAYS AND LE ITERS

resist them at some future day, if their own children repro- duce them. Age and exjierience will have come >y that time.

Sooner or later many of these combatanta and adversaries of to-day will meet on the cross-roads of life, somewhat wearied, somewhat dispirited l»y their struggle with realities, and hand-in-hand will find tli<'ir way hack to the main road, regretfully acknowledging that, in sitite of all their early convictions, the worlJ remains round, and continues always turning in one and the same direction, and that the same horizons ever reappear under the same infinite an<l fixed sky. After having disputed and fought to their hearts' content, some in the name of faith, others in the name of science, both to prove there is a God, and to prove there is no God (two propositions about which one might fight for ever should it be decided not to disarm till the case was proven), they will finally discover that the one knows no more about it than the other, but that what they may all be sure of is, that man needs hope as much if not more than he needs knowledge — that he suffers abominably from the uncertainty he is in concerning the things of most interest to him, that he is ever in quest of a better state than that in which he now exists, and that he should be left at full liberty, especially in the realms of philosophy, to seek this happier condition.

Ho sees around him a universe which existed before he did, and will last after he is gone ; he feels and knows it to be eternal, and in its duration he would like to share. From the moment he was called to life he demanded his share of the permanent life that surrounds him, raises him, mocks him, and destroys him. Now that he has begun he does not wish to end. He loudly demands, and in low tones pleads for, a certainty which ever evades him — fortunately, since certain knowledge would mean for him immobility and death, for the most powerful motor of human energy is uncertainty. And as he cannot reach certainty, he wanders to and fro in the vague ideal ; and whatever excursions he may make into scepticism and negation, whether from pride, curiosity, anger, or for fashion's sake, he ever returns to the hope he certainly cannot forego. Like lovers' quarrels, it is not for long.

So there are, at times, obscurations, but never any com- plete obliteration of the human ideal. Philosophical mists