oodness
to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one
knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner that
repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
depth, of life's meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, but
vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
state. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
state. There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. The
more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
and more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
the azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
while it calls others to be vessels of honor. But the subjectivist
point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
denominator. The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
the so-called favorite of fortune. And the peculiar consciousness of
{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
heart of man.

So much for subjectivism! If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
strictly theoretical point of view. Subjectivism seems the more
rational scheme. And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
nothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point
of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
eternally thinking out and rep