since it does flow from the nature of
the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which
{178} I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining
alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple
objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose-flesh the murder
excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the 'roman
naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
Parisian _litterateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
objective carrion I called it in to take away.

No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar
about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to
think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That 'chance'
whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
'chance' is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the
only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather,
on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air
which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.

And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here,
misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you,