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own; he knows no other, nor of any other can he judge. Not health, nor wealth, nor beauty, nor troops of friends, nor peals of laughter, can ever prove that Alexander on his Bucephalus was happier than Diogenes in his tub.

Granting your request, that man's life should be one even, monotonous ascent, even though it were from what we now call happy to happier, we must still find, in all that each man has lived of life, this same equator, this average consciousness, known by memory of the past: for although now the equator bear the name of Law, above which we have found our joy, and below which we have found our wo, still will it exist, by the necessity of finite life, which, coming short of perfection, can only be more or less imperfect. Examine yourself, and you will find that you consider yourself more or less happy according to what you have experienced heretofore. Therefore we have no reason to suppose that a higher beginning and a higher grade of life would in any manner change the necessities which are over us; and the present life, from the height of its joy to the depth of its wo, in the course of thirty years, is as capable of illustrating your notion of progression as would be a life which began where this one should leave off, and be continued thirty years thereafter.

Taking the present life then for an illustration: "Would it be better that man should have such an even rate of progression that a superior intelligence could calculate his equator by knowing the number of his days;—or that each new day should reveal to him events from various portions of his entire grade