[p.223] But many have found this age of industrialism insufficient. It seems to them so materialistic. It would view things so much from the standpoint of cold naturalism. The attitude of _laissez faire_ as meaning "Let nature do the work," has so widely possessed the minds of men. If only we could get back some of our former idealism and regard nature as once more subject to some supernatural will! Despair like this, however, is blind and as needless as blind. Dependence on a lawful, mechanical nature can bring to human life no loss of what is truly ideal and personally worthy. Instead, it brings constant gain, for the knowledge of law and the making of machinery do not rob men of personal opportunity, but rather make the opportunity for personal achievement only the more manifest. A mechanical nature is always for man, not man for a mechanical nature; and its movement is always productive for man. If, then, industrial life has tended, as it has been supposed to tend, towards materialism and fatalism, the reason can lie only in the blindness of such as refuse to see clearly this visible fact. Not merely something always doing, but something always that man is doing is the definite message of a nature that ever manifests herself under the form of law. To the thinker, in no uncertain syllables, she says: Go forth and do. And our age of industrialism, if hearing this bidding, will lose its unnatural materialism, and find itself quick with a moral and religious instead of a narrowly practical and commercial motive. So in the doubter's world are the spiritual and the material genuinely sympathetic. [p.224] III. A GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY. Besides the reality, without finality, of all things in experience, to which we gave our first attention in this chapter, and the perfect sympathy of the spiritual and the material, which we have just seen to give new dignity to the intellectual life, making thought free, and new worth to the life and movement of nature, making nature not lifelessly mechanical, but mechanically productive; besides these two features of the doubter's world, there still remain two others to be observed by us. For the first of these there is the fact of a genuine individuality. Different persons, as well as different things, possess a substantial worth to the real and the true. No one may be either real or worthy by himself, but no one is unreal for being dependent on others. The persons, like the things, that work together for what is real, find the service its own reward. Reality, having no exclusive resting-place must itself be dependent. It is dependent on an infinite multiplicity of differences. Therein lies the person's chance for individuality; nay, it is his right to it and assurance of it.