In the preceding chapters, we have attempted to get a view of life from a purely physical standpoint, and to show in what ways our race is connected with the terrestrial past, and how much the individual is dependent upon physical conditions, beyond his control, which constitute both the background and the framework of his existence. But as great as are these limitations, they are still not so important as they at first sight would seem, since at least a portion of each person's environment is of his own choosing, and both his body and his mind are, to a greater or lesser degree, what he may elect to make them. Diligence and pertinacity have accomplished wonders along this line, and the poor struggling manual laborer very frequently turns out to be the great discoverer, not only in the province of geography, perhaps on the "Dark Continent," but along all the lines of truth. Nor is even age a bar to achievement, as our own bard tells us: "Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers When each had numbered more than fourscore years; And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his 'Characters of Men.' Chaucer at Woodstock, with his nightingales, At sixty, wrote the Canterbury Tales. Goethe, at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust, when eighty years were past." However, it is far more safe to assume that, whatever we have to do, should be started early in life, for, if we are to carve out our own destinies, we shall need all the time which we have at our disposal. While fully realizing the limiting conditions of heredity and environment, it is difficult to disprove the statement of Cassius, when he says: "Men, at some time, are masters of their fates; The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves; that we are underlings." Perhaps Bulwer-Lytton has, in other words, more forcibly expressed a similar idea when he says: "We are our own fates. Our own deeds Are our own doomsmen."