Thus if we approach in an historian’s spirit the attempt to think out the world-desirable to make for which is to progress in the only sense the word can have, we find humanity divided between those who desire peace and those who want war. On behalf of peace the moralist points not alone to the misery war brings to the vanquished, not alone to its cost to the victor and to the vanity of his ephemeral winnings; but to that utter loneliness which the war of all upon all makes the only lasting portion of each. A solitude of struggle, without one to cheer the effort, without one to share the joy (if joy it can then be called) of triumph--can any human heart endure, let alone desire war? But the amoralist, full of the _certaminis gaudia_, turns in disgust from the hopeless state of the peaceful who having nothing more to fear can have nothing left to hope for. Our longing for peace is an illusion of certain moments of war-weariness, but a picture of eternal peace, stagnant, ambitionless, dead--and yet not dead enough--who could endure it, who could really desire peace? Lonely ambition--peaceful acquiescence in a common lot! The history of human relations is a struggle, more often than not a compromise between these ideals. There is enough inspiring in each to make any man of understanding long for it, there is enough repulsive in each to turn any thoughtful soul against it. Wherefore the gruesome spectacle of world war is but the outer and visible sign of the struggle that goes on every silent moment within the heart of each, as the volcano is but the overt violence of long sullen rumblings that have gone before. And so things must last if and so long as we really want two irreconcilable ideals: compromise must follow makeshift, war must punctuate peace, world without end. * * * * * Into a world so distraught comes that child of God, that messenger of heaven, the modest philosopher. His cheerful gospel is that all men’s ills are curable by taking thought, that men suffer only for their false philosophy. Now, of all philosophies none is so false as that which pretends one cannot have his penny and his cake. True it may be in the letter that I cannot keep a certain copper in my pocket and honestly entice a sweet-meat out of the baker’s window. But I must be a sorry philosopher if I cannot keep all the potentiality of future enjoyment the penny stands for, and yet have all the actual satisfaction I happen for the moment to visualize in the form of cake. Or to put the thought in less poetic and more general terms, the heart that thinks itself torn by conflicting desires owes its plight to the failure of its imagination to realize that only the formulas in which it has so far expressed its desires are in contradiction; the desires themselves may well enough be reconciled in a larger world-view.