d
claim, and yet at the time, because of his natural metaphysical turn, it
accorded with his sense of the mystery of life.

It should be remembered as a factor in this reading that Eugene was
particularly fitted by temperament--introspective, imaginative,
psychical--and by a momentarily despairing attitude, in which any straw
was worth grasping at which promised relief from sorrow, despair and
defeat, to make a study of this apparently radical theory of human
existence. He had heard a great deal of Christian Science, seeing its
churches built, its adherents multiplying, particularly in New York, and
enthusiastically claiming freedom from every human ill. Idle, without
entertainment or diversion and intensely introspective, it was natural
that these curious statements should arrest him.

He was not unaware, also, from past reading and scientific speculation,
that Carlyle had once said that "matter itself--the outer world of
matter, was either nothing, or else a product due to man's mind"
(Carlyle's Journal, from Froude's Life of Carlyle), and that Kant had
held the whole universe to be something in the eye or mind--neither more
nor less than a thought. Marcus Aurelius, he recalled, had said
somewhere in his meditations that the soul of the universe was kind and
merciful; that it had no evil in it, and was not harmed by evil. This
latter thought stuck in his mind as peculiar because it was so
diametrically opposed to his own feelings that the universe, the spirit
of it that is, was subtle, cruel, crafty, and malicious. He wondered how
a man who could come to be Emperor of Rome could have thought otherwise.
Christ's Sermon on the Mount had always appealed to him as the lovely
speculations of an idealist who had no real knowledge of life. Yet he
had always wondered why "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and
steal" had thrilled him as something so beautiful that it must be true
"For where your treasure is there will your heart be also." Keats had
said "beauty is truth--truth beauty," and still another "truth is what
is."

"And what is?" he had asked himself in answer to that.

"Beauty," was his reply to himself, for life at bottom, in spite of all
its teeming terrors, was beautiful.

Only those of a metaphysical or natural religious turn of mind would
care to follow the slow process of attempted alteration, which took
place during the serie