the
last, and only at the last do eyes come in the head of Nature--who knows
but I may find out amongst the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that
blind law which lies nearest the root of life!--Ah, what a dreamer I
should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were
possible! Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of
life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in
the goblet. We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly
limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are
now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught
but despair. Yet why should the thing be absurd? Can any one tell _why_
this organism we call man should not go on working forever? Why should
it not, since its law is change and renewal, go on changing and renewing
forever? Why should it get tired? Why should its law work more feeble,
its relations hold less firmly, after a hundred years, than after ten?
Why should it grow and grow, then sink and sink? No one knows a reason.
Then why should it be absurd to seek what shall encounter the unknown
cause, and encountering reveal it? Might science be brought to the pitch
that such a woman should live to all the ages, how many common lives
might not well be spared to such an end! How many noble ones would not
willingly cease for such a consummation--dying that life should be lord,
and death no longer king!"

Plainly Faber's materialism sprang from no defect in the region of the
imagination; but I find myself unable to determine how much honesty, and
how much pride and the desire to be satisfied with himself, had
relatively to do with it. I would not be understood to imply that he had
an unusual amount of pride; and I am sure he was less easily satisfied
with himself than most are. Most people will make excuses for themselves
which they would neither make nor accept for their neighbor; their own
failures and follies trouble them little: Faber was of another sort. As
ready as any other man to discover what could be said on his side, he
was not so ready to adopt it. He required a good deal of himself. But
then he unconsciously compared himself with his acquaintances, and made
what he knew of them the gauge, if not the measure, of what he required
of himself.

It were unintelligible how a man should prefer being the slave of blind
helpless Law to being the child of living Wisdom, should believe in the
absolu