of all signification; so that the Godhood which it attempts to establish
throughout the whole realm of being, is found to mean nothing. "It is
the night, in which all cows are black."

The optimistic creed, which the poet strove to teach, must, therefore,
not only establish the immanence of God, but show in some way how such
immanence is consistent with the existence of particular things. His
doctrine that there is no failure, or folly, or wickedness, or misery,
but conceals within it, at its heart, a divine element; that there is no
incident in human history which is not a pulsation of the life of the
highest, and which has not its place in a scheme of universal good, must
leave room for the moral life of man, and all the risks which morality
brings with it. Otherwise, optimism is impossible. For a God who, in
filling the universe with His presence, encroaches on the freedom and
extinguishes the independence of man, precludes the possibility of all
that is best for man--namely, moral achievement. Life, deprived of its
moral purpose, is worthless to the poet, and so, in consequence, is all
that exists in order to maintain that life. Optimism and ethics seem
thus to come into immediate collision. The former, finding the presence
of God in all things, seems to leave no room for man; and the latter
seems to set man to work out his own destiny in solitude, and to give
him supreme and absolute authority over his own life; so that any
character which he forms, be it good or bad, is entirely the product of
his own activity. So far as his life is culpable or praiseworthy, in
other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we
necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an
independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. There may be,
and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary
predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his
inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own
life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within
the larger sweep of the life of humanity. He is part of a whole, and has
his place fixed, and his function predetermined, by a power which is
greater than his own. But, if we are to call him good or evil, if he is
to aspire and repent and strive, in a word, if he is to have any _moral_
character, he cannot be merely a part of a system; there must be
something within him which is superior