In spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the social chain in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The murderer has under the written law no right to murder anybody. It is perfectly plain that he has the right if he is willing to pay the penalty, or if he can evade it. Conscience, this thing called conscience, to which people repeatedly appeal, is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, little more than a built-up net of social acceptances and agreements in regard to society or the agreed state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we arrive here; in other words, all the things which we wish to do and be, or avoid.[19] In this unromantic universe Dreiser moves with admiration and delight. At the bottom of his philosophy there is a calm and serene--but disenchanted--individualism, very much like that which took Nietzsche beyond evil and good. Dreiser accepts the struggle for survival like a convinced Darwinian. He views life as a chaos of blind and amorphous energies roused by mysterious and ominous ferments. The game of life is that of the great individuals against the masses. Great men tending to self-expression and self-expansion find themselves blocked by the overwhelming numbers of elementary and gregarious humanity. Hence the war between society and the élite of supermen. Dreiser’s evolutionism, however, does not in the least imply an idea of progress. Change there is, eternal change, mutation, compensation, and, in the last analysis eternal return. Thus Dreiser’s evolutionism is purely organic and static. It is strictly realistic. The fact that a few great individuals emerge from the mass does not justify higher expectations for the future of mankind. Besides, they do not always emerge. Many dynosaurs and superhuman giants fail pitifully and are buried alive in the mud. Geology and anthropology endorse Dreiser’s pessimism on the subject of man’s fight with the blind forces of nature.