And shout with the coarse-haired wolves?

* * * * * *

What of thy priests' confuting,
Of fate and form and law,
Of being and essence and counterpoise,
Of poles that drive and draw?
Ever some compensation,
Some pandering purchase still!
But the vehm of achieving reason
Is the all-patrician Will!"

Mr. Blood must manage to re-write the last two lines; but the contrast
of the two securities, his and the rationalist's, is plain enough. The
rationalist sees safe conditions. But Mr. Blood's revelation, whatever
the conditions be, helps him to stand ready for a life among them. In
this, his attitude seems to resemble that of Nietzsche's _amor fati_!
"Simply," he writes to me, "_we do not know_. But when we say we do
not know, we are not to say it weakly and meekly, but with confidence
and content. . . . Knowledge is and must ever be _secondary_, a
witness rather than a principal, or a 'principle'!--in the case.
Therefore mysticism for me!"

"Reason," he prints elsewhere, "is but an item in the duplex potency of
the mystery, and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
Reason and Wonder blushed face to face. The legend sinks to burlesque
if in that great argument which antedates man and his mutterings,
Lucifer had not a fighting chance. . . .

"It is given to the writer and to others for whom he is permitted to
speak--and we are grateful that it is the custom of gentlemen to
believe one another--that the highest thought is not a milk-and-water
equation of so much reason and so much result--'no school sum to be
cast up.' We have realized the highest divine thought of itself, and
there is in it as much of wonder as of certainty; inevitable, and
solitary and safe in one sense, but queer and cactus-like no less in
another sense, it appeals unutterably to experience alone.

"There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these
inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience
will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable
stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the
universe is wild--game flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle
all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the
different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the
breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the
whole curve, never an instant true--ever not quite