than you can be, you will get the lesser, and the lesser is not best, for it could be better.

The belief that what is to be will be is also thoroughly wrong. Only that will be in the life of man that he himself will cause to be. And man has the power not only to change causes but to create new and greater causes. True, he must follow the laws of life, but the capacities of those laws have no limit. Therefore there can be no end to the possibilities in him who applies those laws according to their largest possibility and measure.

There is no fixed time for life or death, and no events are pre-ordained. Every life can be prolonged. Every event could have been different. And everything that happens to man could have added far more to his life than it does. From this fact we judge that few things happen for the best because man himself is seldom at his best. Nearly everything could have been better; but if they are not now what they might be, if we had been what we could be, the wisest course is to turn them to the very best account, and in the future maintain the very highest standard that the mind can possibly construct. When every person takes his life into his own hands and lives that life so perfectly that the very best that can be done now is being done now, everything will happen for the best. And what is more, such a life will advance perpetually into the better.