Not that mysticism has no place in life and thought. It may have a very important place. But the mystic can only appeal to other mystics. Those who have not had his actual or fancied experiences can attach no weight to his "proofs"; to offer proof is to adopt the tests of science, to acquiesce in the results of such tests. Let the mystic who asserts he is certain of the existence and presence of God tell us how we may achieve like certainty, like communion, a like sense of presence. Let him even plead for free play for the will to believe-in other words, for the provisional adoption of his particular hypothesis. This is legitimate, as we have seen. But if, with the best will in the world, we fail to verify his hypothesis, to repeat his experience, he cannot censure us for rejecting his hypothesis and framing another, or for suspending even tentative and provisional opinions till the right amount of evidence of the right quality-scientific evidence, in a word-is available and a new working theory becomes profitable and serviceable.

We may add, in conclusion, that there will never be a dearth of theories. We frame them too readily, rather than too reluctantly. The neo-Agnostic does not dogmatize. He does not deny propositions that he does not understand, and does not issue sweeping denials of all possible propositions concerning God or purpose in creation. He denies only propositions which he knows to be arbitrary, false or absurd, and he asks for explanations and definitions of terms in propositions which appear to carry meaning but do not really possess any.

SIDELIGHTS ON HISTORY

H

BY HENRI VANDERBYLL

ONESTY will compel us to admit that the mind is a miserably inefficient instrument, in its present condition of development, at least, with which to grasp this immense scheme of existence. It threatens to cease operating should we persist in confronting it with the incomprehensible immeasurability of that which is. Such threats perhaps constitute a source of discouragement for us. We think of this fussy, foolish, weeping, sweating humanity in connection with the utter purposelessness and futility of all its wondering and questioning, of all its seeking, hunting and ferreting out the truth! But a consoling thought is the following: our forefathers were worse off than we are at present. Their minds were more miserably inefficient than ours are today. History clearly hints at the fact that the human race is steadily progressing, intellectually, towards a certain point. It is true that we, the individual, travel but a negligible distance. Nature, however, concerns herself with the future of the race, and not particularly with that of the individual. When we, therefore, find ourselves caught in the maelstrom of life, wondering in despair what it is all about, let us solve the problem half way by realizing that we are, for a fleeting moment, a part of a slowly-progressing whole. Ours is the duty to conspire with nature towards the realization of her schemes concerning the entire human race by being as good a part as lies within our power.

Even if we cannot find a satisfactory answer to the burning question relating to the mystery of being, we should consider that the average intelligence of the whole of which we are a part completely overshadows that of any humanity that existed in the past. Here, then, is a source of hope that casts its searchlight on a future human race: from utter night and inability to think, through the twilight of half-awakeness, towards daylight and understanding, such is the course which humanity is following according to the facts.

of history. Our ancestors have left a sufficient number of imprints on the sands of time to enable us to obtain an idea of the general direction in which they were traveling. Their course followed a more or less straight line that extends through the present into the future, and their destination seems to have been at all times the hidden throne of supreme intelligence. But man's journey through existence is a more or less complicated one. The trail is constantly picked up by offspring and next generation where parent and ancestor breathe their last. Succeeding generations travel faster than their predecessors, and their appreciation of the surrounding scenery is different from that of the latter. In the second place, noisy activity that reverberates through the hollow past, and false glory and glitter that cast their deceiving luminosity upon the screen of the present, are liable to divert the attention of the superficial observer from the actual human thing that travels through space and time to the expressions that of necessity accompany it. But, perhaps, we encounter our greatest difficulty in forming an adequate conception of a progressing human race.

Was our present human race born in darkest antiquity, did it slowly and painfully develop into the present product, and is it now toiling towards still greater heights? There seems to be question, at all times, of several human races that simultaneously share the shelter of this globe. One among them, however, is specially favored by nature. It is permitted to lean upon the past, and to gradually raise itself into the golden mist of the future. In time, the other races vanish, almost imperceptibly, from the presence of ascending man. The latter is occasionally reminded of their existence as he sees them wander aimlessly in the vicinity, like distant memories that haunt the present, like tired souls that seek a resting place. A humanity is constantly progressing, even if scattered heaps of human debris mark the trail which it follows through eternity. It represents the noblest product which nature has been able to fashion, with age-long, infinite patience, from her original supply of human clay. It is the life-driven core which, stem-like, shoots high above the first ephemeral human leaves, and which eventually must culminate in the full-grown flower that rocks on the breeze of heaven. What sort of flower, and what sort of heaven? We cannot know. But we can surmise. Its growth, like that of all upward-shooting stems, is imperceptible from moment to moment, but measurable when we compare its present development with that of a remote yesterday.

In our endeavor to roughly measure human progress, we should not forget the fact that nature has cast her trial packages of human beings upon the earth, and that many have been found wanting by the gods. The temporary greatness of half-fashioned man echoes through the past, and makes a bit of ancient history. But the contents of the best among the packages is still the basic substance of the God-aspiring human being of today who writes his share of the eternal history of man upon the granite brow of time. True it is that all men spring from a common origin, but not all men traveled the same road, nor did they cover equal distances. Some turned to the left, some to the right, and some went straight ahead. Those who wandered from the main highway of evolution lingered for a while, dreaming their dreams of bygone greatness, then silently and unobserved slid into the abyss of oblivion. Those who traveled straight ahead, the torchbearers of intelligence, ascended the peak of civilization, and their present descendants are still climbing. The latter look down upon the trails made by the wanderers who, ages ago, went to the left and to the right-trails that finally will lose themselves in the scrapheap of evolution. Evolution chooses at all times the best from among its innumerable samples of humanity. The superior product must ye be improved upon, must become another stepping stone in the process of fashioning ideal man.

The task of roughly measuring the progress which man has made during a certain period of time is, therefore, a difficult one. We compare present man with the human being of two thousand years. ago, and we conclude that man has progressed considerably during that period of time. But who is man of today, and who was he of two thousand years ago? Human beings live at present that cannot compare very favorably, as far as intelligence is concerned, with men that existed twenty centuries ago. The reverse is true. But when we mention today's human being, we unconsciously refer to the most developed men of the present. We choose, likewise, the leading civilization of twenty centuries ago for a basis of comparison. In fact, in our study of human progress, we should retrace the steps of those that temporarily functioned as torchbearers of human intelligence. That is something which we often neglect to do. As a result, we are unable to join the many dim and time-hidden sections of the human trail in such a manner that the whole becomes a path of uniform progress. We see the very beginning of things, climb in thought through the realm of physical evolution into the domain of human intelligence, continue soaring towards the present and, finally,

Such conclusions

behold the immediate doom of the human race. completely puzzle the logical mind. If two hundred thousand, nay, a million years, spell seven consecutive letters of the word, progress, across the desert of the past, should we not expect that the last and completing letter is being written at present, or that it will be written in the near future? And should we not make an effort, at least, to search for indications pointing at the fact that such is the case, rather than throw a million years of progressive creation into the depths of cataclysmic oblivion?

There is a class of thinkers whose failure to see in history a more or less unbroken path of human progress is caused by mistranslating the past rather than by misunderstanding the present. Their ideas, we believe, constitute a greater impediment to the progress of enlightenment than those of the sensationally inclined pessimists who are prepared to throw humanity on the scrapheap of time. They have mixed the sections of the ancient human trail. They have misspelled the word, progress, in such a manner that the final letter was written thousands of years ago. They urge us to be guided by the thoughts and the sayings of people who lived in an age when the simplest phenomena of nature were completely hidden mysteries for the human mind. They would have our intellect cease its further efforts, and accept that which other minds, long ago, managed to unravel from the tangled threads of this baffling existence.

In these days of modernism, the extraordinary spectacle presents itself of antiquity coming back to life. One is modern, apparently, when one's thoughts linger on the level of intelligence of some twenty or thirty centuries ago. Religions and cults are being founded on the "ancient wisdom." Half-forgotten superstitions are being resurrected from the garbage pile of human thought, wrapped in an attractive, modern dress, after which they become excellent sources of income for unscrupulous adventurers. Unless evolution is a myth, however, or unless the mind is exempt from its laws, the pages of history should not be turned back for the purpose of discovering intelligence equal to or greater than the present one. The journey of humanity is, for one thing, a progressively intellectual one. We often fail to penetrate down to intelligence, and we stop at the vividly colored screen of murders, battles, inquisitions, and revolutions that rather effectively camouflage history. But history's distant smoke and thunder are expressions that necessarily belong to the average intelligence of the history makers. When reading with an open mind, we should gather from the records that, as time