The recognition of this fact does not, however, imply the futility of all history. It does not imply that any history is good enough for men since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. So to conclude is to disregard completely the implications of pluralism. If no history can claim absolute distinction, all histories are distinguished, nevertheless, from one another. If no history can claim preëminence over any other, it is true also that none can be robbed by any other of its own distinction and character. The fact that the morning stars do not sing together is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. The fact that the rain falls equally upon the just and the unjust is evidence neither of the impartial dispensations of deity nor of the equal issue of vice and virtue. Each event in its own history and illustrative of its own career is the law. Yet men have been prone to write their own history as if it were something else than a human enterprise, as if it were something else than the history of humanity. Those who seek to read their destiny from the constellations ascendant at their birth are generally called superstitious; but those who seek to read it from the constitution of matter, or from the mechanism of the physical world, or from the composition of chemical substances, although no less superstitious, are too frequently called scientists. But "dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return" is an essential truth only about the history of dust; it is only an incidental truth about the history of man. One learns nothing peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. It affords no measure of the appreciation of poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the passion for happiness. Human history is human history only. The hopes and fears, the aspirations, the wisdom and the folly of man are to be understood only in the light of his career. They are to be understood in terms of that into which they may and do eventuate for him, by the way in which they are incorporated into his past to make it more fully remembered and more adequately understood, and by the way they are used for his future to make his past more satisfactory to remember and more satisfying to understand. Yet some there are who stop worshipping the stars when they discover that the stars neither ask for worship nor respond to it, and who dismiss reverence and piety when they discover that a god did not create the world. Perhaps they should not worship the stars nor believe in God, but neither astronomy nor geology affords good reasons for putting an end to human reverence and faith. If the stars have not begged man to worship them, he has begged them to be an inspiration to a steadfast purpose. It is in his history, not in theirs, that they have been divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how traitorous to his own history, if he shames his capacity for reverence, when once he has found that the stars have a different history from his own.