understood the
word 'facts' in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them,
seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to
what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line
and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy
in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you have people
agree, when one is deaf and the other blind?

*****

The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that
gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to
invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency,
and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truth and
part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced
by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and
indecent himself. New truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy,
our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm,
and, in the first at least, some good.

*****

The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and
the bones and the revolutions of the Kosmos in whose joints we are but
moss and fungus, more ancient still.

*****

The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad,
even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every
climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a virtue
and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look into our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair
of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed
to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and
only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face
of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.

*****

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are
the perfect duties.... If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it
they are wrong. I do not say 'give them up,' for they may be all you
have;