The biologist might answer, I suppose, that this craving for a different kind of world is simply our own consciousness of that blind push of natural forces which create the variations on which natural selection works to produce the survival of the fittest. Nature, he might say, is wholly indifferent to the outcries of the individual; this vast process of which each of us is so insignificant a part, keeps going because there is in all the parts a superabundant urging to go on. There is no human economy in it and no human order. Man, for example, has far more sexual desire than is needed for the rational propagation of the species. But there is no rational plan in nature. It works here, and everywhere, on the principle that by having too much there will surely be enough; the seeds which do not germinate, the seedlings which perish, the desires which are left over, are no concern of nature’s. For nature has no concern. There is no concern except that which we ourselves feel, and that is a mere flicker on the stream of time, and will soon go out. While there is no way of gainsaying that this explanation is true, it is true only if we look at life from the particular point of view which the biologist adopts. If, however, [p151] we look inwardly upon ourselves, instead of surveying our species from the outside, we find, I think, that this sense that the world ought not to be what it is seems to originate in a kind of dim memory that it once was what we feel it ought to be. Indeed, so vivid is this memory that for ages men took it to be an account of historical events; in absolute good faith they constituted for themselves the picture of a Golden Age which existed before evil came into the world. Hope was, therefore, a kind of memory; the ideal was to achieve something which had been lost. The memory of an age of innocence has haunted the whole of mankind. It has been a light behind their present experience which cast shadows upon it, and made it seem insubstantial and not inevitable. Before this life, there had been another which was happier. And so they reasoned that what once was possible must somehow be possible again. Having once known the good, it was unbelievable that evil should be final. Even after criticism has dissolved the beautiful legends in which it was embodied, this memory of a Golden Age persists. It persists as an intimation of our own inward experience, and like an uneasy spirit it intrudes itself upon our most realistic efforts to accept the world as we find it. For it takes many shapes, which sometimes deceive us, appearing then not as the memory of a happiness we have lost, but as the anticipation of utopia to come.