But whether, when they have built it, they will think Jerusalem worth the building is quite a different matter. It may be that Leopardi was right when he said, "Men are miserable by necessity, but resolute in believing themselves to be miserable by accident." That is a proposition which the individual can accept or reject so far as his own little span is concerned, but on which the race, as such, can pass no valid judgment. Life has never had a fair chance. It has always been so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that no man can say what life, in its ultimate essence, really is. All we know is that many of its miseries are factitious, inessential, eminently curable; and till these are eradicated, how are we to determine whether there are other evils too deep-rooted for our surgery? It may be, for example, that the elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum for Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide this _a priori_? Let us learn what are the true potentialities of life before we undertake to declare whether it is worth living or not. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point some words of my own which express the idea I am trying to convey as clearly as I am capable of putting it. They are part of the last paragraph of an address entitled _Knowledge and Character: The Straight Road in Education_:[5] The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man would never have been man; he would only have been one more species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe, the reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better than unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead of "each man for himself" his motto became "each man for his family, or his tribe, or his nation, or--ultimately--for humankind." And, at a very early stage, what made for association, co-operation, brotherhood, came to be designated "good," while that which sinned against these upward tendencies was stigmatized as "evil." From that moment the battle was won, and the transfiguration of human life became only a matter of time. The prejudice in favour of the idea of good is the fundamental fact of our moral nature. It has an irresistible, a magical prestige. We have made, and are still making, a myriad mistakes--tragic and horrible mistakes--in striving for good things which are evils in disguise. A few of us (though relatively not very many) try to overcome the prejudice altogether, and say, "Evil, be thou my good!" But even these recreants and deserters from the great army of humanity have to express themselves in terms of good, and to take their stand on a sheer contradiction.