s us
we must beware of the justest of men, for there are things to which
even these cannot remain faithful. As our physical organism was
devised for existence in the atmosphere of our globe, so is our moral
organism devised for existence in justice. Every faculty craves for
it, and is more intimately bound up with it than with the laws of
gravitation, of light or heat; and to throw ourselves into injustice is
to plunge headlong into the hostile and the unknown. All that is in us
has been placed there with a view to justice; all things tend thither
and urge us towards it: whereas, when we harbour injustice, we battle
against our own strength; and at last, at the hour of inevitable
punishment, when, prostrate, weeping and penitent, we recognise that
events, the sky, the universe, the invisible are all in rebellion, all
justly in league against us, then may we truly say, not that these are,
or ever have been, just, but that we, notwithstanding ourselves, have
contrived to remain just even in our injustice.

19

We affirm that Nature is absolutely indifferent to our morality, and
that were this morality to command us to kill our neighbour, or to do
him the utmost possible harm, Nature would aid us in this no less than
in our endeavour to comfort or serve him. She as often would seem to
reward us for having made him suffer as for our kindness towards him.
Does this warrant the inference that Nature has no morality--using the
word in its most limited sense as meaning the logical, inevitable
subordination of the means to the accomplishment of a general mission?
This is a question to which we must not too hastily reply. We know
nothing of Nature's aim, or even whether she have an aim. We know
nothing of her consciousness, or whether she have a consciousness; of
her thoughts, or whether she think at all. It is with her deeds and
her manner of doing that we are solely concerned. And in these we find
the same contradiction between our morality and Nature's mode of action
as exists between our consciousness and the instincts that Nature has
planted within us. For this consciousness, though in ultimate analysis
due to her also, has nevertheless been formed by ourselves, and, basing
itself upon the loftiest human morality, offers an ever stronger
opposition to the desires of instinct. Were we to listen only to these
last, we should act in all things like Nature, which would invariably
seem to justify the triumph of the