In conclusion, perhaps one may introduce oneself, not in the least as connected with all these distinguished persons, but simply as a type of a great number of average human beings, who live and suffer and have to fight their way somehow through the blinding mist of years and tears. When I was sixteen, I read the ‘Origin,’ and I think the impression it produced has never been obliterated. It is not, it has never been, the maintenance of any deliberate philosophical theory. I am too utterly without intellectual training or equipment even to form such a thing. It is not any aggressive or militant agnosticism. It is simply a feeling of utter insignificance in face of the unapprehended processes of nature, such as Leopardi expresses with bare intensity: ‘Nature in all her workings has other things to think of than our good or ill.’[106] It is a sense of being aimlessly adrift in the vast universe of consciousness, among an infinity of other atoms, all struggling desperately to assert their own existence at the expense of all the others. Apparently this sense of struggle among individuals, struggle everywhere, among theories and beliefs, as well as living creatures, does not affect every one with the same oppression of distress. There are natures so healthily constituted that they have the mere joy of adventure in it, and can go on forever elbowing their way through the crowd of other nothings with the splendid affirmation of their individuality in the conflict. If it is a question of theories, they can say with Professor Whitehead: ‘A clash of doctrines is not a disaster; it is an opportunity.’ If it is a case of more material strife, they can disguise it with the ameliorations of the social instinct, or such substantial optimism as sustained President Eliot through his ninety years in the view that the joy of life is in ‘contest without conflict.’