t--my hand will bear, all my life, the infallible sign of
love or of murder. Chiromancy maybe delusion or not--it matters but
little; here we are concerned with the great moral truth that underlies
this distinction. The place that I fill in the universe will never be
changed by my thought; I shall be as I was to the day of my death; but
my actions will almost invariably move me forwards or backwards in the
hierarchy of man. Thought is a solitary, wandering, fugitive force,
which advances towards us today and perhaps on the morrow will vanish,
whereas every deed presupposes a permanent army of ideas and desires
which have, after lengthy effort, secured foot-hold in reality.

62. But we find ourselves here far away from the noble Antigone and the
eternal problem of unproductive virtue. It is certain that
destiny--understood in the ordinary sense of the word as meaning the
road that leads only to death--is wholly disregardful of virtue. This
is the gulf, to which all systems of morality must come, as to a
central reservoir, to be purified or troubled for ever; and here must
each man decide whether he will justify fate or condemn it. Antigone's
sacrifice may well be regarded as the type of all such as are made in
the cause of duty. Do we not all of us know of heroic deeds whose
reward has been only misfortune? A friend of my own, one day, as he lay
on the bed he was never to leave save for that other one only which is
eternal, pointed out to me, one after the other, the different
stratagems fate had contrived to lure him to the distant city, where
the draught of poisonous water awaited him that he was to swallow,
wherefrom he must die. Strangely clear were the countless webs that
destiny had spun round this life; and the most trivial event seemed
endowed with marvellous malice and forethought. Yet had my friend
journeyed forth to that city in fulfilment of one of those duties that
only the saint, or the hero, the sage, detects on the horizon of
conscience. What can we say? But let us leave this point for the
moment, to return to it later. My friend, had he lived, would on the
morrow have gone to another city, called thither by another duty; nor
would he have paused to inquire whether it was indeed duty that
summoned him. There are beings who do thus obey the commands that their
heart whispers low. They fret not at fortune's injustice; they care not
though virtue be thankless; theirs it is only to fight the injustice of
men,