The yearning for joy is a cry of nature which can never be stifled. Give heed to it and obey it. It calls you to wider horizons, to warmer sympathies, to a fuller growth, to a completer development. It holds the secret of Evolution. It is the incessant prompter to a higher form of existence. Biologists have discovered that the avoidance of painful and the search for pleasurable sensations are the first principles of organic animal life, and are those which have developed the amœba into the man. In him, this general consciousness has blossomed into Self-consciousness, and to this he owes all the growth of his higher nature, his essentially human powers. To the extent that this is brought into harmony with the sum of his faculties and with his surroundings, he wins that something greater than pleasure which we call happiness. From the culture of this, if from any source, he must look for the advent of those new spirit-powers which more fortunate generations in the hereafter may enjoy. Who knows but those, our dear children of after days, may gain a still higher form of consciousness, one through which they will be brought into harmony with the perfect working of the Cosmos, and the ancient fable be realized, of men who walked the earth as gods? III. _The Relative Value of Pleasures._ The learned have established what they call “a hierarchy of the sciences,” a scheme which shows the relative value and scope of the various departments of knowledge, and how the one rises upon the other. So in the Science of Happiness there is a series of degrees, a _gradus ad gaudium_, which measures the relative value of human enjoyments and the dependence of the higher upon the lower. The ignorance or the disregard of this fact has led to the ruin of more individual lives, and to more fatal misfortunes to the race, than any other error whatsoever. The poison of all false religions and philosophies lies either in condemning pleasure or in commending low forms of it; and the one is as hurtful as the other. The religion which to-day numbers more believers than any other, Buddhism, aims its loftiest aspirations to the extinction of all desire and the abolition of all enjoyment. These are the words of Buddha himself:―― “Let no man look for what is pleasant; for not to find it is pain. “Let no man love anything; for the loss of the beloved is sorrow. “After pleasure follows grief, and from affection comes fear. “I have run through many births, and painful it is to be born again and again; but now, O Thou Builder of this house, Thou hast been seen, and not again shalt Thou rebuild it. The mind has attained to the extinction of all desire.”