We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on. These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance that, for all its intricacy, has a planetary rhythm, and the sober motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not understand. And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly, our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation. As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance, like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new formula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.