“There is a relation between the garden _soil_ and a _thought_. Soil is assimilated into a potato, etc. The potato is eaten, digested, and built into a brain, and the brain is the organ of thought. “So we find a relation existing between the whole course of nature; between star and planet; the body and the food we eat; the soil and our life; the male and the female; the residence and our health; labor and our garments; truth and happiness. “With these preliminary remarks in our mind, let us see whether we can trace and combine the two great phenomena--happiness and truth. Happiness may be represented as being the power which initiates and guides our course of action; and an organism which is at rest would never move again, if, by remaining quiet, it found from time to time greater happiness. _Truth_ may be represented as being a path which leads a sentient organism in complete harmony with the facts of the universe. There are countless other paths besides the path of Truth, which a sentient being may travel, but there is only one--the path of Truth which rewards the traveler with the greatest happiness, while all the countless others punish him with more or less misery, and sometimes with instantaneous death. “If it be true, then, that all sentient organisms are in pursuit of the greatest happiness, and that happiness can be attained only by traveling on the path of Truth, all sentient creatures, whether human beings or inferior animals, would be traveling the path of Truth only, if they possessed sufficient intelligence always to ascertain that path. For, traveling on any other path, would sooner or later be attended with pain; and would therefore be a contradiction in terms to the proposition that all sentient beings are in pursuit of the greatest happiness, which is only realized completely when all the desires of the organisms are satisfied. If, then, the foregoing conclusions are true, and they have stood the test of the keenest scientific inquiry on our globe for ages, all misery, pain, wrong, evil, or whatever we may name it, must be ascribed to ignorance; and this proposition is substantiated by the application of every known psychological fact. To illustrate: