that instead of giving way to the evil
he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive
pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he
does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves
his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,--will not every
one confess that the bad character of the _M_ is here the _conditio
sine qua non_ of the good character of the _x_? Will not every one
instantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beings
susceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence,
courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurably
inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form of
triumphant endurance and conquering moral energy? As James Hinton
says,--

"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains.--these are the only things in
which we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not there,
existence becomes worthless, or worse; {102} success in putting them
all away is fatal. So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their
holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that
which taxes their endurance and their energy. This is the way we are
made, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a
fact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the
intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more
endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannot
stand it. The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it
fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as
they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes
patient,--that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are
too great, but that _we are sick_. We have not got our proper life.
So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential
element of the highest good."[3]

But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper
life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of
the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if
we try pertinaciously enough. This world _is_ good, we must say, since
it is what we make it,--and we shall make it good. How can we exclude
from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation
of the truth? _M_ has it