Brief as are the sensations of success, victory, happiness, etc., yet these are things of actually some duration and as such can be looked forward to and back upon with pleasure, which in itself is a kind of reward for living. Love is real, a kinetic vibration of great comfort and a reward, as well as are the gratifications which arise from a sense of wealth or power or any hunger satiated. All these may be exceedingly brief and do fade, but however brief and however quickly faded they endure for at least a minute fraction of time and are therefore, and legitimately so, the basis of much human hope, ambition, delight, as well as despair and all the other contraries which might otherwise be inexplicable. The pathetic thing in connection with them all is that they are so plainly baits as well as rewards, that they do prove man to be the victim or evoluted mechanism if not tool of some higher, perhaps scheming force by no means essentially friendly to, if it is even conscious of, him, and that an enduring state of pleasure for anything is not contemplated by Nature as an essential portion of the career of man; also that it may be by no means concerned as to whether or no man, its tool, achieves any moments of triumph or satiation. Looking at most lives--the defeated, the hungry, the poorly equipped mentally and physically, the homely, those seized on in childhood by the strong and shrewd and made to serve pointless and wretched purposes entirely alien to their lives--I should say that Nature does not care and that distinctly for them life may not be worth its pains. On the other hand, where crass chance lifts a given organism to great power or builds it with such care that it is an almost perfect and delicately responsive machine, life may well be and no doubt is worth all its costs. Many organisms, by accident of dullness or non-responsiveness of a higher sort, come off with less pain, and Nature, either accidentally or intentionally, builds most of these. They are machines well suited to the rough grind of material and psychic forces, and may be said to strike such a neat equation with the circumstances of life that they achieve a kind of sensory comfort or satiation and so do well enough. Again, dulling religion or illusions of one type and another, fatuitous hopes far beyond the pale of possibility, sensory response of a comfortable character to this earthly scene as a spectacle, or depleted nervous energy or force which reduces many to the point where nervous or sensory response is lacking, eases many to the place where it may be said that if they do not enjoy keenly they at least do not suffer keenly.