change is self-determined,” I continued, making almost an effort to think, so weird was that scene before us, “the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power.  In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the building of continents.  He has used his powers of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying prescience in nature’s own material frame, and wield the world for the better accomplishment of her apparent ends,—­that, though unimaginable now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic motions,—­chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason.  Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object of knowledge,—­a curious form of the beauty of truth.”

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature’s comment.  “But,” I continued, “what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves.  The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were.”  Instinctively we looked on the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of.  I went on after the natural pause,—­I could not help it,—­“’I was a different man, then,’ we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery.  How old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart.  As time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective,