16 HUMANISM i 



know the good or the bad ; nay, our very will to know 

 may so alter the conditions as to evoke a response con 

 genial with its character. 



It is a law of our nature that what we seek that we 

 shall, in some measure, find. And so, like a rainbow, 

 Life glitters in all the colours ; like a rainbow also it 

 adjusts itself to every beholder. To the dayflies of fashion 

 life seems ephemeral ; to the seeker after permanence, it 

 strikes its roots into eternity. To the empty, it is a 

 yawning chasm of inanity ; to the full, it is a source of 

 boundless interest. To the indolent, it is a call to 

 despairing resignation ; to the strenuous, a stimulus to 

 dauntless energy. To the serious, it is fraught with 

 infinite significance ; to the flippant, it is all a somewhat 

 sorry jest. To the melancholic, each hope is strangled 

 in its birth ; to the sanguine, two hopes spring from 

 every grave of one. To the optimistic, life is a joy 

 ineffable ; to the pessimistic, the futile agony of an 

 atrocious and unending struggle. To love it seems that 

 in the end all must be love ; to hate and envy it becomes 

 a hell. The cosmic order, which to one displays the 

 unswerving rigour of a self-sufficient mechanism, grows 

 explicable to another only by the direct guidance of the 

 hand of God. To those of little faith the heavens are 

 dumb ; to the faithful, they disclose the splendours of a 

 beatific vision. 



And so each sees Life as what he has it in him to 

 perceive, and variously transfigures what, without his vision, 

 were an unseen void. But all are not equally clear-sighted, 

 and which sees best, time and trial must establish. We 

 can but stake our little lives upon the ventures of our 

 faith. And, willing or unwilling, that we do and must. 



And now in conclusion let me avow that after professing 

 to discuss the relations of Philosophy and Practice, I must 

 seem to have allotted an undue share of my time to the 

 former, and to have done little more than adumbrate the 

 practical consequences of my philosophy. In extenuation 

 I must urge that the stream of Truth which waters the 

 fertile fields of Conduct has its sources in the remote and 



