To most of us the morning stars that once sang together are of another stuff. The music of the spheres must be vastly different from the roar and grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we turn to the heavens, the abode of purity and light. So do we discount and black-list the earth where we have to pay in struggle and pain the price of our development. Think you we should not have to pay the same price in any other world worth living in? Emerson in his Journal quotes his brother Charles as saying long ago that “the nap was worn off the earth”; it was become threadbare, like an outworn garment. Probably it seems so to each of us as time goes on. In places in Europe the nap must be very short at this time. But the nap will come again, even on those shell-swept regions, after Nature has had her way. Nature grows old in geologic or in cosmic time; the mountains decay, the waters recede; but in man’s time the earth is endowed with perennial youth. Science strips us of our illusions and delusions; it strips us of most of the garments in which the spirit of man has sought in all ages to clothe itself against the chill of an impersonal universe; it takes down the protecting roof of the heavens above us and shows us an unspeakable void strewn with suns and worlds beyond numbers to compute, but nowhere any signs of the blessed abode to which our religious aspirations have pointed. It is interesting, in this connection, to note the attitude of the old writers, such as Cornaro, the Italian, toward the heavens. They evidently look upon the heavens as outside of Nature. In speculating as to why it is that some persons have so little vitality, Cornaro reckons the influence of the heavens may be one cause. He says he never could persuade himself to believe that Nature, being the mother of all, could be so ungenerous to any of her children; hence it must be some hostile influence from above. Similar notions seem to have been held in Shakespeare’s time: “It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions; Else one self mate and make could not beget Such different issues.” XIII. THINKING AND ACTING