582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



retires more and more out of view; until tlic thouglit of crime itself, 

 and even of enormous crime, becomes familiar, and at last is carried 

 almost unconsciously into act. It is not, then, from want of morality 

 that men do wrong, but from want of another sort of knowledge. They 

 know what is right and what is wrong ; it is not from overlooking this 

 distinction that they fall into the wrong, nor would they escape the dan- 

 ger by reflecting upon it ever so much. What determines their action 

 is a belief in some sort of necessity, some fatality with which it is vain 

 to struggle ; it is a general view of human life as unfavorable to ideals. 



Another such general view of human life produces apathy. A man 

 who has persuaded himself that we are the creatures of circumstances, 

 or that we are the victims of laws with which it is impossible for us 

 to cope, will give up the battle Avith Nature and do nothing. Per- 

 haps he has his head full of instances of the best endeavors after hap- 

 piness failing entirely, or by some fatality producing extreme unhap- 

 piness ; of the purest and noblest labors producing mischief which 

 comjDlete inactivity would have avoided; how Queen Isabella intro- 

 duced the Inquisition ; how Las Casas initiated the slave-trade ; how 

 pauperism has been over and over again fostered by i:)hi]anthropy ; 

 how the Prince of Peace himself, according to his OAvn saying, brought 

 a sword upon the earth. He may think that human life, as it runs on 

 naturally, is not a bad thing, but that all attempts to control it or im- 

 prove it are hopeless ; that all high ideals are merely ambitious ; that 

 purpose and, still more, system and all sophistication of life are mis- 

 chievous. And so he may come to renounce all free-will, he may re- 

 sign himself to the current of ordinary affairs, and become a mere con- 

 ventionalist, reconciling himself to whatever he does not like, and 

 gradually induced to tolerate with complete indifference the most 

 enormous evils. Against such a perversion of mind morality is no 

 defense ; what is needed is not anew view of what ought to be such 

 a man knows well enough what ought to be but a new view of what 

 can or may be, a more encouraging view of the universe. 



Sometimes the despair of human life goes to a much greater length. 

 Human, life is a game at which we are not forced to play ; we may at 

 any time throw i;p the cards. That only a few do so proves that more 

 or less distinctly most of us have a general view of life not altogether 

 unfavorable. We are for the most part hardly aware of this general 

 view, because it is always the same. We should become painfully 

 aware of it if it were suddenly to change. There is, as it were, a 

 suicide-mark below which our philosophy is always liable to sink. If 

 we came to think life irreconcilably opposed to our ideals, and at the 

 same time were enthusiastically devoted to our ideals, life would be- 

 come intolerable to us. If our sense of the misery or emptiness of life 

 became for some reason much more keen than it is, life would at last 

 become intolerable to us. With individuals one of these two things 

 is constantly taking place ; they might just as well take place with 



