IN THE SHETLANDS 185 
another, or does he not, rather, imagine that he is 
repelling an attack made upon himself? I believe 
myself that this last, or something very like it, is 
really the case, and that sympathy, if traced far enough 
back along the line of our descent, would lead us to 
a time when it made no conscious distinction between 
itself and its object ; thus rooting our best feelings in 
the purest selfishness. 
There is, indeed, this to be objected against the 
noblest emotions by which the highest natures are 
actuated—those very exalted ones about which there 
has been, and still is, so much self-laudation—viz. 
that they are all tainted in their origin. This is 
an objection—I mean as against the optimistic stand- 
point—which nobody ever seems to consider; but 
with me it is a very grave one. What matters 1t— 
that is to say, what ground of jubilation is it—that 
some “noble numbers,” as Herrick calls them, have 
somehow got into a great “sculduddery book,” 
written upon a plan, and, as far as we can see, with an 
object which never contemplated or thought of them 
at all, but only of the sculduddery, in relation to 
which they exist as a small pool may by the side of 
a great muddy, turbulent river, out of which it has 
leaked, and, by some accident, become clear? If this 
is all, then they are mere by-products, and it is not 
by a by-product that any scheme can be justified. 
It is to the scheme itself we must look, judging of it 
by what seems its clear object and intent, and having 
regard to the mass of the facts through which it 
