CHAPTER VIII.
THE PRACTICAL PROSPECT.
_Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck....
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell._ Shakespeare, _Sonnet XIV_.
The prospects I have been just describing as the goal of positive progress will seem, no doubt, to many to be quite impossible in its cheerlessness.

If the future glory of our race was a dream, not worth dwelling on, much more so, they will say, is such a future abasement of it as this.

They will say that optimism may at times have perhaps been over-sanguine, but that this was simply the exuberance of health; whereas pessimism is, in its very nature, the gloom and languor of a disease.
Now with much of this view of the matter I entirely agree.

I admit that the prospect I have described may be an impossible one; personally, I believe it is so.

I admit also that pessimism is the consciousness of disease, confessing itself.