But if God, or Good, is imminent, working for some far-off, Divine event, why the intermediate pother? I wonder at times why those who ponder these things with a view of “saving” the race and so eventually establishing truth, justice, mercy here on earth, are not permanently confused or hushed into silence by the overwhelming evidence that no one thing, however put together by the human brain to endure, succeeds ultimately in maintaining itself or that which it dreams it will maintain. Religions come and go. Laws are written and fade away. Moral laws change with groups and climates. There remains only this necessity for equation, some form of adjustment, reciprocity, balance between the integral factors of each group, good, bad or indifferent, which no one thinks of translating as the _only omnipresent evidence of so-called Divine Will_. Indeed, since it is not necessarily directly connected with the welfare of the individual but is something to which, willy-nilly, he must at least roughly adjust himself, however successfully he may temporarily evade it, if he wishes to live, it has come to be looked upon by him as the machinations of a devil who opposes his God. In other words, dogmatic morals, as we understand these, have been introduced, although these same, or our interpretation of what is essential to the welfare of life, may not agree with the larger chemic urge and the import of this compulsion of balance as Nature views or uses the same. It follows, then, that many things which we now consider essential to our racial or spiritual development, especially those which are intended to fit us for a purely mythical heaven, may not be essential at all. Especially may this be true of the many taboos and so-called moral social arrangements which we have established here to make comfortable our little passing state and which, by a process of egoism and self-interest, we ascribe to the will of God. Asceticism in morals, as well as self-imposed deprivations of any kind intended to bring us into conformity with the exact righteousness of Nature or God, may have nothing to do with any Divine mandate or impulse whatsoever. The investigations of the mechanists and the monists throw a very disturbing light on Nature (Loeb; Crile; Snyder). Excess, we know--or its equivalent, strain--is destructive to any organism, and the dogmatic moralist may well caution against it. Yet does a Creator who creates by billions and allows whole races, such as the American Indians, for example, to disappear almost in a generation, care particularly whether this, that or the other organism is broken down by this, that or the other strain or excess? It may be that excess is entirely gratifying to Him or It--like a shell maker pleased with the explosive power of his shells. What is one man, one organism, one race of organisms, to a thing that produces them by quintillions, age in and age out? So a conditioning law of equation or balance which compels a rough