sant, these are delusive
experiences, which, if he saw life steadily and whole, he would know
as such. But one reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know.
Good men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because they are
misled by false ideas, partly, also, because, knowing them false,
they cannot or will not give them up. This is what Goethe very well
understood when he said, "Most men prefer error to truth, because
truth imposes limitations and error does not."

And another reason is that when men do know, they find a deadly and
mysterious, a sort of perverted joy--a sweet and terrible and secret
delight,--in denying their own understanding. Thus right living calls
for a repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor
Babbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that
knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identical with moral
perception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unless
observation and experience are alike fallacious. Thus the whole
argument falls to the ground when we confess that possession of
knowledge does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the two
things, knowledge and virtue, according to universal experience, are
not identical. Humanists indeed use the word "knowledge" for the most
part in an esoteric sense. Knowledge is virtue in the sense that it
enables us to see virtue as excellent and desirable; it is not virtue
in the sense that it alone enables us to acquire it.

Who, indeed, that has ever lived in the far country does not know
that one factor in its fascination was a bittersweet awareness of the
folly, the inevitable disaster, of such alien surroundings. Who
also does not know that often when the whole will is set to identify
conduct with conviction, it may be, for all its passionate and bitter
sincerity, set in vain. In every hour of every day there are hundreds
of lives that battle honestly, but with decreasing spiritual forces,
with passion and temptation. Sometimes a life is driven by the fierce
gales of enticement, the swift currents of desire, right upon the
jagged rock of some great sin. Lives that have seemed strong and fair
go down every day, do they not, and shock us for a moment with their
irremediable catastrophe? And we must not forget that before they went
down, for many a month or even year they have been hard beset lives.
Before that final and complete ruin, they have been drifting and
struggling, driven and fi