you just now.
There is the abyss.
The animal is a complete being. That which constitutes the grandeur of
man is the being incomplete; it is the feeling one's self to be many
degrees removed from completion; it is the perceiving something on that
side of one's self, something on this side. This something is mystery;
it is--to make use of those feeble human expressions which always come
one by one, and never express more than one side of things--the moral
world. This moral world man bathes in, as much as, more than, in the
material world. He lives in what he feels, more than in what he sees.
Creation may beset him, want may assail him, pleasure may tempt him,
the beast within him may torment him, but all in vain; a sort of
incessant aspiration toward another world impels him irresistibly
beyond creation, beyond want, beyond pleasure, beyond the beast. He
glimpses everywhere, at every moment, the upper world, and he fills his
soul with that vision, and regulates his actions by it. He does not
feel complete in this life on earth. He bears within him, so to speak,
a mysterious pattern of the anterior and ulterior world--the perfect
world--with which he is incessantly, and despite himself, comparing the
imperfect world, and himself, and his infirmities, and his appetites,
and his passions, and his actions. When he perceives that he is
approaching this ideal pattern, he is overjoyed; when he sees that he
is receding from it, he is sad. He understands thoroughly that there
is nothing useless or superfluous in this world, nothing which does
not proceed from something, and which does not lead to something. The
just, the unjust, good, evil, good works, evil deeds, fall into the
abyss, but are not lost there, passing on into the infinite, for the
benefit or the burden of those who have accomplished them. After death
they are collected, and the sum-total cast up. To disappear, to vanish,
to be annihilated, to cease to be, is no more possible for the moral
atom than for the material atom. Hence, in man, that great twofold
sense of his liberty and of his responsibility. It is given him to be
good or to be bad. It is an account that will have to be settled. He
may be guilty, and therein--a striking circumstance upon which I
dwell--consists his grandeur. There is nothing similar for the brute.
With the brute it is all instinct: to drink when thirsty, to eat when
hungry, to procreate in due season, to sleep when the sun sets, to wake
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