292 Sir William B. Grove [April 20, 



15,000 to 20,000 cabs, omnibuses, vans, private carriages, &c., all 

 struggling, the horses jmshing the earth back and themselves forwards, 

 the pedestrians doing the same, but the horses compulsorily — they 

 have not as yet got votes. The occupants of the cabs, vans, &c., are 

 supposed to act from free will, but in the majority of cases they are 

 as much driven as the horses. Insolvents trying to renew bills, rich 

 men trying to save what they have got by saving half an hour of time. 

 Imagine, if you can, the friction of all this, and add the bargaining in 

 shops, the mental efforts in counting-houses, banks, &c., and road 

 repair, now a permanent and continuous institution. Take our rail- 

 ways : similar efforts and resistances. Drivers, signal-men, porters, 

 &c., and the force emanating from the sun millions of years ago, and 

 locked up in the coal-fields, as Stephenson suggested, now employed 

 to overcome the inertia of trains and to make them push the earth in 

 this or that direction, and themselves along its surface. Take the 

 daily struggles in commerce, law, professions, and legislation, and 

 sometimes even in science and literature. Politics I cannot enter 

 upon here, but must leave you to judge whether there is not some 

 degree of antagonism in this pursuit. In all this there is plenty of 

 useful antagonism, plenty of useless — much to please Ormuzd and 

 much to delight Ahriman ; but of the two extremes, over-work or 

 stagnation, the latter would, I think, do Ahriman's work more 

 efiiciently than the former. We cry peace when there is no peace. 

 "Would the world, however, be better if it were otherwise ? Is the 

 Kirvana a pleasing prospect ? Sleep, though not without its troubles 

 and internal antagonism, is our nearest approach to it, but we should 

 hardly wish to be always asleep. 



Shakespeare not only knew something about gravitation, but he 

 also knew something about antagonism. He says, by the mouth of 

 Agamemnon — 



" Sith every action that hath gone before, 



Whereof we have record, trial did draw, 



Bias and thwart, not answering the aim. 



And that unbodied figure of the thought 



That gav't surmised shape." 



In no case is the friction of life shown more than in the perform- 

 ance of " duty," i. e. an act of self -resistance, a word very commonly 

 used ; but the realisation of it is by no means so frequent. Indeed, 

 faith in its performance so yields to scepticism that it is said that 

 when a man talks of doing his duty, he is meditating some knavish 

 trick. 



The words good and evil are correlative : they are like height and 

 depth, parent and offspring. You cannot, as far as I can see, conceive 

 the existence of the one without involving the conception of the other. 

 In their common acceptation they represent the antagonism between 

 what is agreeable or beneficial and what is painful or injurious. 



An old anecdote will give us the nouon of good and evil in a 



