ings and workings is
over, and death has come to ask how much we have done. Sin and Pain
and Injustice are realities, and what is worse, they are necessities:
they are not despite Nature, but through Nature; destructive forces
perhaps, but which Nature requires for her endless work of construction;
punished perhaps in the individual wretch devoted to them, but ordered
nevertheless by that same punishing power which requires them. And worse
still, evil and good are not opponents, they are not for ever destroying
each other's work, for ever marshalled in battle against each other;
they are combined though hostile, used in the same great work of action
and reaction: together they build and destroy, together they are knit in
closest and most twisted bonds of cause and effect; bonds so close, so
inextricably crossed and recrossed that severing one of them, tearing
and cutting them asunder, it seems as if the whole universe would crash
down upon us. In this world of reality where evil leads to good and
life to death; where harmonies are imperfect, there is no unvarying
correspondence between things, no necessary genesis of good from good,
and evil from evil. There is much conflict and much isolation. And thus
the world of the physically beautiful is isolated from the world of the
morally excellent: there is sometimes correspondence between them, and
sometimes conflict, but both accidental and due to no inner affinity,
but only to exterior causes: most often there is no relation at all. For
the qualities of right and wrong, and of beautiful and ugly, and our
perceptions of them, belong to different parts of our being, even as
to a yet different part of our being belong our perception of true and
false, that is, of existing and non-existing. A true thing need by no
means be a good or a beautiful thing: that generations of men are doomed
to sin and misery is no good fact; that millions of putrifying bodies
lie beneath the ground is no beautiful fact, but both are nevertheless
true facts, true with that truth of which science, had it perception of
good and of beauty as well as mere perception of truth, should say, "I
recognize, but I shudder"--And thus also is it with the good and the
beautiful: they have no connection except that, each in its kingdom, is
the best, the desirable, that for which we should all strive, that for
which the whole of nature, despite its inextricable evils, seems to
crave and to struggle. A pure state of s