686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of things, the high and lofty destinies, and all that ? Schopenhauea- 

 and Bahnsen, earnest thinkers, arrive, after exhaustive examination 

 and mature deliberation, at the conclusion that the world is not the 

 best but the worst conceivable, the best possible issue for it annihila- 

 tion, man's greatest misfortune birth, his greatest happiness death. 



And yet the everlasting impossibility of accepting this as a final 

 statement proves unquestionably its partiality proves there must be 

 quite a ditFerent and broader verdict. Duni sxnro spero ; respiration 

 is aspiration. Life is hope, is struggle upward and onward. Healthy 

 and robust life can set no final goal to its endeavors and hopes, but 

 carries deep in its bosom the promise of quite an infinity of inheri- 

 tance dim and unconscious perhaps, yet latently warm and unques- 

 tioning. 



Despair is death, declension from once recognized higher ideas is 

 degeneration, violation of principles of honor and justice once recog- 

 nized is inevitable injury. In the active furtherance of spiritual or 

 universal ends alone has man solid and complete satisfaction. What 

 is the meaning of the universal Jeremiad from the beginning of time 

 till now but "the fall," the declension from the necessary justice and 

 goodness ? Down to the last stage of depravity the man is never at 

 home in his depravity. It is always c^epravity, and not native bad- 

 ness. The man's unsightliness, alienation from himself and his fel- 

 lows, inward sense of bankruptcy and ruin, is an eloquent, pathetic 

 sermon in behalf of the true. Injustice, selfishness, disavowal of 

 obligations, seizure of others' property, never enriched or profited a 

 man, but has always been so much inward contraction, induration, 

 plethora, deliration always so much disease involving so much pain, 

 demanding so much expiation. 



The subordination of self in the pious recognition of the eternal 

 laws (= religion) and the adequate willing execution of the same 

 (= art) that alone is life, and a man is more or less according to the 

 measui'e of his possession of this life. In the name of God, which is 

 our highest expression of the world, is recognized something higher 

 than our utmost sense of the just, good, and beautiful. If, then, our 

 hearts go out in fervent, irrepressible longings of love toward the great 

 men who have met on this planet the most unhandsome reception, if 

 we demand that the heavy debt of love and esteem which was due to 

 Lessing, for example, but never paid, be at last made good to him, 

 that this excellent spirit, which out of a full heart would radiate to the 

 quickening and enlightening of his country and Europe, do not strike 

 his beams into emptiness, but that he himself also be gladdened by 

 the warm reflection of his own light is there, are we to suppose, 

 nothing in tlie heart of things, nothing in the primal intellect and 

 heart corresponding to this unsubduable demand on the part of our 

 remote individual consciousness ? Shall the mother-sun be less warm 



