The exercise of this power is the task appointed for us by the indomitable promptings of our own spirit, a task in which we need not labour without hope. For as the various plants and animals have found foothold and room to grow, maintaining for long periods the life congenial to them, so the human race may be able to achieve something like its perfection and its ideal, maintaining for an indefinite time all that it values, not by virtue of an alleged intentional protection of Providence, but by its own watchful art and exceptional good fortune. The ideal is itself a function of the reality and cannot therefore be altogether out of harmony with the conditions of its own birth and persistence. Civilization is precarious, but it need not be short-lived. Its inception is already a proof that there exists an equilibrium of forces which is favourable to its existence; and there is no reason to suppose this equilibrium to be less stable than that which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits. There is no impossibility, therefore, in the hope that the human will may have time to understand itself, and, having understood itself, to realize the objects of its rational desire. We see that the "Cosmos" here invoked is not inconsistent with the "Nothingness" before described. It is a triumph amid illusions, an order within chaos, _la gloire du néant_. This hint of a reconciliation between the practical optimism natural to an active being, and the speculative pessimism inevitable to an intelligent one, is happier than the muddled solutions of the same problem with which current philosophies have made us familiar. The philosophy suggested by Jean Lahor is that of Spinoza, if we subtract from the latter its mystical optimism, and add a broad appreciation of human culture. Man cannot attain his happiness by conforming to that which is hostile to himself; he can thus attain only his dissolution. But by using what is hostile to himself for his own ends, as far as his energy extends, he can make an oasis for himself in Nature, and being at peace with himself, be at peace also with her.