So we bring up the history of the mountains till it joins with the history of the people; and as the story finishes, does not one great thought emerge--the thought of the youth, the recentness of man alongside the hoary mountains? During the one hundred million years of the mountains' history mankind has existed only a quarter of a million; and his recorded history extends over not even a hundredth part of a single million years. And if we reflect on this, and consider, too, that the sun's heat will last to render life possible for many millions of years yet, does it not seem almost criminally childish for us--Hindus, Christians, and Mohamedans alike--to be so continually and incessantly looking backward to great and holy men of the past, as if all the best were necessarily behind, instead of sometimes looking forward to the even greater men to _come_--to the higher _species_ of men who will yet evolve; of whom our holiest and our greatest are only the forerunners; and for the production of whom it should be our highest duty to consciously and of purpose pave the way, as the poor primitive men, though unconsciously, prepared the ground for the civilised men of to-day? Ought we not to more accurately adjust our sense of proportion; to rise above the ant-like attitude of mind, and attune our thoughts to the breadth and height of the mountains, to the purity of their snowy summits, and to the depth and clearness of the liquid skies they almost touch?
To some the sight of these mountain masses, the thought of the tremendous forces which gave them rise, and the idea of the aeons of time their moulding has involved, brings no other feeling than depression. The size, the titanic nature of the forces and the vastness of the time impress them only with a sense of the littleness of man in comparison. But why should the mountains thus depress? Why should not their history bring us the more worthy thought of the mighty possibilities of the race? For man, small in stature though he may be, is after all the flower and finish of the evolutionary process so far; he is century by century acquiring a completer mastery over Nature; and when we see how young and recent he is beside the aged mountains, when we realise how they have only evolved by minute gradations accumulating over vast periods of time, and when we reflect that nearly similar periods may yet lie before mankind, should not our thoughts dwell rather on man's future greatness and on the mighty destiny which he _himself_ may shape?