Much of what I have written will appear obvious. But if it has been obvious, it will be because I have here attempted to focus attention on some of the corollaries of a single fundamental truth--so obvious that it often escapes notice, but so fundamental that its results cannot but fail to obtrude themselves upon us. I mean the unity of phenomena--not merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a Mediterranean bay)--the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at best neutral. All that links us to them is that we are built of the same stuff, the same elements. But the last half-century has at least enlarged our view so that we can perceive that we, as living things, are not alien to the rest of life--that we march in the same direction, and that our hostility to and struggles with other organisms are in part but the continuation of the old struggle, in part the expression of the fact that we have acquired new methods for dealing with the problems of existence. The origin of life itself, and its movement in time--both these are found to face in the same direction as ourselves. St. Paul wrote that all things work together for good. That is an exaggeration: but they work together so that the average level of the good is raised, the potentialities of life are bettered. In every time and every country, men have obscurely felt that, although so much of the world, taken singly, was evil, yet the clash of thing with thing, process with process, the working of the whole, somehow led to good. This feeling is what I believe is clarified and put on a firm intellectual footing by biology. The problems of evil, of pain, of strife, of death, of insufficiency and imperfection--all these and a host of others remain to perplex and burden us. But the fact of progress emerging from pain and battle and imperfection--this is an intellectual prop which can support the distressed and questioning mind, and be incorporated into the common theology of the future. Dean Inge, in his Romanes Lectures,[17] quotes Disraeli’s caustic words, “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization,” and quotes them with approval. He bitterly criticizes what we may sum up as Millenarianism (although this after all is but a crude and popular aspiration after what the Christian would call the Kingdom of God on earth). And, after exalting Hope as a virtue, closes with the somewhat satirical statement, “It is safe to predict that we shall go on hoping.”