‘Profounder, profounder Man’s spirit must dive, To his aye-rolling orbit No goal will arrive?’” “That is the glorious secret, my dear friend. The end of man is not the possession, but the pursuit, of happiness, or rather eternal progress and growth. By the fact that the pain, the want, the aching void, remains eternally, there is and must be eternal activity, therefore eternal development and progress of humanity.” “But as that development and progress leave us as far as ever from happiness, or fixed and durable good, I see not in what consists their value.” “Their value is obvious. Good is relative to the end of a being, and consists in going to the end for which it exists. Progress being our end, of course our good must consist in making progress. This progress is the progress of the race, and is effected by the activity of individuals, and to it all the activity of individuals, whether what is called vicious or virtuous, alike contributes.” “If all our activity, our vices, and crimes, as well as our virtues, contribute to this progress, or to the realization of our destiny, I do not see any great call for us to be world reformers. Moreover, our destiny seems to be any thing but a cheering one. Your poet-philosophy is apparently very sad. If we are destined to chase forever a happiness that flies us, a good that recedes as we advance, all exertion seems to me as idle, as useless as that of the child striving to grasp the rainbow.” “So it may seem to you, for you are, as yet, not a philanthropist. You are still affected by your egotism, and unable to appreciate any activity that does not bring something solid and durable to the individual. Here is the rock on which all old-fashioned morality splits. Individuals are nothing in themselves; they are real, substantial, only in humanity. The race is every thing. Individuals die, the race survives. Men and women have no substantiality of their own. They are merely the bubbles that rise on the surface of the broad ocean of humanity, burst, disappear, and become as if they had not been. Foolish bubbles, ye forget your own nothingness, and would arrogate to yourselves all the rights and prerogatives, glory and happiness of humanity. The race is not for individuals; individuals are for the race. They are simply the sensations, sentiments, and cognitions of the race, in which it manifests its own inherent virtuality, and through which it is developed and carried forward in its endless career through the ages,—through which it grows and realizes its own eternal and glorious destiny. The progress you are to seek is not the progress of individuals, for individuals have, properly speaking, no progress; but the progress of the race, which is and can be effected only by the activity of individual men and women.” “Still, I do not comprehend the work there is for world-reformers.”