Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



ment in us, and we have to put up with them. 

 Like the grain of sand in the oyster, we are forced 

 to make pearls of them. 



These are the precipices and chasms which 

 give form to the mountain. Who wants a mountain 

 sprawHng indifferently out on all sides, without 

 angle or break, like the oceanic tide-wave of which 

 one cannot say whether it is a hill or a plain ? 

 And if you want to grow a lily, chastely white 

 and filling the air with its fragrance, will you not 

 bury the bulb of it deep in the dirt to begin 

 with ? 



Acknowledging, then, that it is impossible to 

 hold permanently to any line of distinction between 

 good and bad passions, there remains no course 

 for us but to accept both, and to make use of them 

 — redeeming them, both good and bad, from their 

 narrowness and limitation by so doing — to make 

 use of them in the service of humanity. For as 

 dirt is only matter in the wrong place, so evil in 

 man consists only in actions or passions which 

 are uncontrolled by the human within him, and 

 undedicated to its service. The evil consists 

 not in the actions or passions themselves, but in 

 the fact that they are inhumanly used. The 

 most unblemished virtue erected into a barrier 

 between one self and a suffering brother or sister 

 — the whitest marble image, howsoever lovely, 

 set up in the Holy Place of the temple of Man, 

 where the spirit alone should dwell — becomes 

 blasphemy and a pollution. 



Wherein exactly this human service consists 

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