“Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still; and until among them are seen the first vague forms of men. “Then look at these forms of men, how steadily they have advanced in perfection and toward the good. Steadily, I say, though at times the advance has been set back for perhaps a thousand years—till the highest development of individual man was reached. That is to say, the highest development that men could reach toward the good as individual entities. “Then what happened? From purely material causes all these individual entities have become, or are becoming, fused into one great universal entity. The struggle of the world spirit to higher things found itself held up by the individual brain, just as before the birth of organic life it found itself held up by the limits of the inorganic world. It burst that boundary, and now it has burst the narrow limit imposed by the individual mind and has found a new outlet for its energies in the mind universal. “And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the individual men it has taken into its great keeping. “Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and cruelty. “Since Man has arisen, he has taken war in his hand; he is weighing it and finding it wanting. He has taken superstition and is pulling its vile wings off. He is taking the unjust magistrate by his shoulders and shewing him the door; and he has put his heel on the tyrant king. He is freeing the individual man from the odious idea that the individual man is made of mud, to be burnt forever in hell if there is a flaw in his making. And he has taught humanity at large that it is an infamous thing to hang a poor devil for the theft of a sheep. “Man is only a hundred years old, and he has done all that since his birth. “The world spirit has been only a hundred years on this new path of development. Can you doubt, then, seeing its progression during a billion years, and how it has spread over ever new fields, that it will continue so to progress and so to spread into fields newer still?” “I can not.” [Sidenote: The Craving for Truth]