n proportion as they fail to realize
such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity,
in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of
effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state
of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary,
whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example
from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or
distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain
himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto
himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge,
the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction
through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by
stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to
most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society,
because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept
arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good,
including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own
intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives
it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why
the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social
crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs.
But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal,
disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever
reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations
of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no
effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over
his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that
all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible
depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of
the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty,
there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital
nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.

These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but
are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in
the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of
one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among