It is this incalculability of our conscious life that makes its seeming end so great an adventure. This Time which rushes past us, blotting out everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended on a Present, which, as we turn to look at it, has melted away,--how are we to comprehend it? The thin, fragile and uncertain stream of our memory seems insufficient to give any satisfaction of permanence. I like to think of a world-memory that retains the past. Physical things that change or perish continue to live psychically in memory; why may not all that passes, not only in our minds, but unknown to us, be carried along in a great world-mind of whose nature we get a dim inkling even now in certain latent mental powers of ours which are sometimes revealed, and seem to let down bars into a boundless sea of knowledge. The world is a great, rushing, irreversible life, not predestined in its workings, but free like ourselves. The accumulating past seems to cut into the future, and create it as it goes along. Nothing is then lost, and we, although we had no existence before we were born,--how could we have, since that moving Present had not created us?--would yet, having been born, continue to exist in that world-memory. We do not need to reëcho the sadness of the centuries,--“Everything passes; nothing remains!” For even if we take this world-memory at its lowest terms as a social memory, the effects of the deeds of men, for good or for evil, remain. And their words remain, the distillation of their thought and experience. This we know, and we know, moreover, that “one thing at least is certain,” not that “this life dies”--for that has yet to be proved--but that “the race lives!” Nature is so careless about the individual life, so careful for the species, that it seems as if it were only the latter that counted, that her only purpose was the eternal continuation of life. And many to-day find a satisfaction for their cravings for immortality in the thought that they will live in their children and so on immortally as long as their line continues.