ghting, sin drawing nearer and nearer, their
fated lives urged on, the mind growing darker, the stars in their
souls going out, the steering of their own lives taken from their
hands. Then there has been the sense of the coming danger, the dark
presentiment of how it all must end when the "powers that tend the
soul to help it from the death that cannot die, and save it even in
extremes, begin to vex and plague it." There has been the dreadful
sense of life drifting toward a great crash, nearer and nearer to what
must be the wreck of all things. What does the humanist have to offer
to these men and women who know perfectly well where they are, and
what they are about, and where they would like to be, but who can't
get there and who are, today and every day, putting forth their last
and somber efforts, trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin until
the darkness and the helplessness shall lift and something or someone
shall give them peace!

Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically limits the
power of the intellect. It is this which the Socratic identification
ignores. So while we might readily grant that it is in the essential
nature of things that virtue and truth, wisdom and character,
understanding and goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is it
not trifling with one of the most serious facts of human destiny
to interpret the truism to mean that, when a man knows that a
contemplated act is wrong or foolish or ugly, he is thereby restrained
from accomplishing it? Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that
mere reason or mere perception can control the will. And this is the
conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says: "Some people
say that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge. It seems
to them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists in
man, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave.
Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence of
incontinence, arguing that nobody with a conception of what was best
could act against it, and therefore, if he did so act, his action
must be due to ignorance." And then Aristotle adds, "The theory is
evidently at variance with the facts of experience."[35] Plato himself
exposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, its inhuman demand
upon the will, the superreasonableness which it expects but offers no
way of obtaining, when he says, "Every one will admit that a nature
having in perfectio