The myth of the Epochs of Nature was at first a theory to account for the existing order of nature. For a long time it satisfied the inquiring mind, if not with a solution at least with an answer to its queries. After geologic science had learned to decipher the facts of the world’s growth as written on the stones which orb it, the religious mind fondly identified the upheavals and cataclysms there recorded with those which its own fancy had long since fabricated. The stars and suns, which the old seer thought would fall from heaven in the day of wrath, were seen to be involved in motions far beyond the pale of man’s welfare, and, therefore, the millennial change was confined to the limits of our planet. Losing more and more of its original form as an attempted explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized nations as an allegorical type of man’s own history and destiny, and thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its interpretation in psychology. Broadly surveying the life of man, philosophers have found in it much matter fit either for mockery or tears. We are born with a thirst for pleasure; we learn that pain alone is felt. We ask health; and having it, never notice it till it is gone. In the ardent pursuit of enjoyment, we waste our capacity of appreciation. Every sweet we gain is sauced with a bitter. Our eyes forever bent on the future, which can never be ours, we fritter away the present, which alone we possess. Ere we have got ourselves ready to live, we must die. Fooling ourselves even here, we represent death as the portal to joy unspeakable; and forthwith discredit our words by avoiding it in every possible way. Pitiable spectacle of weakness and folly, is it capable of any explanation which can redeem man from the imputation of unreason? Is Wisdom even here justified of her children by some deeper law of being? The theologian explains it as the unrest of the soul penned in its house of clay; the physiologist attributes it to the unceasing effort of organic functions to adapt themselves to ever varying external conditions. They are both right, for the theologian, were his words translated into the language of science, refers to the _effort to adapt condition to function_, which is the peculiar faculty of intelligence, and which alone renders man unable to accept the comfort of merely animal existence, an inability which he need never expect to outlive, for it will increase in exact proportion to his mental development. Action, not rest, as I have elsewhere said, must be his ideal of life.