If the intuitions of these men in advance of the race are not foolishness, this matter must be regulated by some great principle--perhaps some corollary of "the law of compensation," that has been so generally guessed at--notably by Emerson, and which seems closely akin to the Law of Equilibration, whose demonstration by Spencer has no small claim to be considered the highest reach of the human mind. Few men have given, or even recognized, an answer from their own experience. Few men, even, live long enough for experience to give very full indication. Whatever may be the egotism of obtruding here personal experience on a point so intimate, I follow what in this connection seems almost a duty, in stating the conviction of a very long life which has known its share of shadow, that in the average man under average circumstances the Divine Law does go down farther into the details of our lives than we can realize, and there work out good from apparent evil. Yet though the question as we stated it above, in terms of Law instead of Providence, is not entirely new to thinkers, before the latter part of the last century it had been as vague as had been the conceptions of Evolution. It seems but yesterday, and it is with a start that one realizes that this epoch is already superseded by one where the range of mind must be mapped out anew, and where reaches of it that Fiske pronounced impossible are declared by no mean observers to have actually been accomplished. It is, however, questionable how far the testimony of poets and imaginative thinkers is the result of optimistic generalization, and how far the result of strict experience. As sober a man as Socrates said that his attendant monitor always kept him right. Had he had the modern conception of the universal beneficent Law, and the very modern conception of impressions, _under Law_, from discarnate intelligences, perhaps he would have regarded that attendant of his as a manifestation from the source of all Law--of that Law whose penetration into the minutiæ of our lives we are now considering. Now if you are in the habit of testing questions by the law of Evolution, ask yourself (if you have not already done so and obtained a satisfactory answer), at what point in your processes and the processes of your environment, the operation of Law, and the resulting evolution, stops. Don't bother with the paradox of Free Will and Determinism, or any other paradox that proves a question to be beyond the range of our faculties, but accept the fact which you cannot escape, that your life is the result of the interaction of two processes of Law that manifestly tend on the whole to happiness, and perhaps you will find it as hard _not_ to believe that the beneficent Law goes down to the minutest details of your life, as it is _to_ believe a conception so novel and so tremendous.