The first to be mentioned is, “Bow to the inevitable.” I include this because frustration is inevitable, on account of the discrepancy between the finite and the infinite order, and because we are to use inevitable frustration for the purpose of experiencing the reality of the ideal. But without this use in mind, the inevitable presents itself as a mere blind necessity, in which we can see neither right nor reason, a hostile doom that simply crushes us. The psychological effect of the thought of an event as inevitable, it is true, is in any case calming, but the tranquillity thus induced is a heavy and hopeless one. And those who accept the inevitable in this stupefying manner often become meaner in their way of living. The light of life is for them extinguished. They put up perhaps with creature comforts, or with work that merely keeps the mind occupied, and prevents it from fretting the wound, thus allowing slow time to cicatrize it. There is, however, a larger way in which a materialist may regard the inevitable. The world in his view being a vast machine, he may, as it were, identify himself with the machine, and thereby rise in thought superior to the injury it inflicts on him. But though we can imagine someone thus deadening his feelings when he himself is the victim, we cannot well conceive of the same remedy applying when a beloved person, say an only child, is being crushed under the Juggernaut car of the world-machine. _The great test of one’s philosophy of life is whether it helps us in the case of those whom we love, rather than in the case of the sufferings we experience in our own person._ A second consolation is: Remember the universality of sorrow. Look around you, behold the vast multitude who are suffering like you; remember the countless generations who have suffered in the past, think of the generations to come that will suffer in like manner. Such are some of the consolations of the choruses in the Greek tragedies. Latent perhaps in this mournful view of the facts of existence is another aspect of the matter, namely, the uprising from frustration toward ideal realization. And in so far as this other uplifting view is indeed latent or suggested, the thought of the universality of sorrow has an ennobling effect. On the other hand, without the explication of what may be regarded as implicit in them the consolations of the Greek choruses are inexpressibly saddening.