“Quite so,” agreed my friend, “and there are times when I am inclined to agree with him, but at most times not. I used to keep hanging in one of my offices, printed and framed, that famous quotation from Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned, and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ But I took it down because it was too discouraging. And yet,” he added after a time, because we both fell silent at this point, “although I still think it is true, as time has gone on and I have experimented with life and with people I have come to believe that there is something else in nature, some not as yet understood impulse, which seeks to arrange and right and balance things at times. I know that this sounds unduly optimistic and vainly cheerful, especially from me, and many—you, for one, will disagree—but I have sometimes encountered things in my work which have caused me to feel that nature isn’t altogether hard or cruel or careless, even though accidents appear to happen.” “Accidents?” I said; “holocausts, you mean.” But he continued: “Of course, I do not believe in absolute good or absolute evil, although I do believe in relative good and relative evil. Take tenderness and pity, in some of their results at least. Our friend Z——, on the contrary, sees all as accident, or blind chance and without much if any real or effective pity or amelioration, a state that I cannot reason myself into. Quite adversely, I think there is something that helps life along or out of its difficulties. I know that you will not agree with me; still, I believe it, and while I do not think there is any direct and immediate response, such as the Christian Scientists and the New Thought devotees would have us believe, I know there is a response at times, or at least I think there is, and I think I can prove it. Take dreams, for instance, which, as Freud has demonstrated, are nature’s way of permitting a man to sleep in the presence of some mental worry that would tend to keep him awake, or if he had fallen asleep, and stood in danger to wake him.”