ebts without injustice to higher claims. If a
man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be
postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a
sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration,
but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to
be done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency
of all actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_,
forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall
construct the temple of the true God.

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened[714] by
seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout
vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that
unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and
hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin
itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme
satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an
experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least
discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as
true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none
are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my
back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
circles proceeds, the eternal