It may not be unthinkable under average circumstances, but when the world is cursed as never before with carnage and outrage, in relation to the millions suffering one hesitates even to suggest such an idea. But this is hardly the time to pass upon it. And yet many sane people do pass upon it, and believe that out of all this agony more good than evil is to come, and to come to each person concerned. Such a belief, however, is generally based on faith in the immortality of the soul. Here comes in the pragmatic argument, never so strong as now. If these millions of bright young lives have been developed merely to be prematurely snuffed out at the behest of a barbarian mad with the lust of conquest, the universe is _pro tanto_ a farce. But if, in the glory of heroism and self-sacrifice, they are advanced to a higher stage of being, the sanity and beneficence of the universe are vindicated. True, the pragmatic argument is a dangerous thing, but in this most important particular, it never had so much support from positive evidence as now. It looks as if humanity were at last evolved to the point where the intuitions of the gifted of the ages, from Socrates to Swedenborg, may soon be supported by experience open to the observation of all. In his day, Fiske did probably more than any other man to rationalize these leading ideas that are still little more than faiths, and to keep men's minds open to the best within our knowledge, and the influences that must exist beyond it. PLEASE EXPLAIN THESE DREAMS Your travels, your babies, and your dreams,--these, it is said, you may talk of only at your peril. And yet I am emboldened in this instance to defy the adage, though in general I believe it to be nearly incontestable, because I think I may excite a certain curiosity by recounting a kind of dream that comes to me occasionally, a dream not wonderful in substance but one that raises a question in psychology, or in common sense, to which I know no answer. I may say at once that there is nothing preternatural about the dream, nor anything, I think, that Freudian analysts will revel in. But there is none the less a puzzle which for me and for the persons whom I have consulted has remained completely baffling. What the puzzle is had best be stated at the outset.