ersary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his
own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it
for himself, and takes account, not only of what the adversary says, but
also of the best that he _might say_, if only he had chanced to think of
it.

On this principle I have endeavored myself to act. The process, however,
may in some cases be not without the seeming danger that the converter,
in thus arming himself for his task, may perform it somewhat too
thoroughly, and end by being himself perverted. He must, at all events,
go near to experiencing a sense of such perversion dramatically. Of this
fact I have myself provided an example in one of my writings, to which I
just now alluded, and which herein differs from the rest. Having
elsewhere argued in defense of religious faith, as though feeling that,
through argument and knowledge, mankind will some day recover it, I
wrote the work here in question as a man might write who had himself
made a final--even a complacent--surrender to the forces which he had
dreamed of dissipating.

This work is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly
suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a
doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let
us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a
certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its
form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which
contains in embryo all the substance of the modern doctrine of
evolution, those passages which bear on the meaning of man's existence.
I arranged these in logical order, and translated or paraphrased them in
the meter with which Fitzgerald has familiarized and fascinated the
English ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might
be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a
pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more
than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks
upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the
prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy
will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a belief in a
personal God, who is offended by the very nature of man, and who watches
with a wrathful eye by the deathbed of each