ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



limited; it is a minor counter-current, but it is just 

 as real as the good; it is a phase of the good; we have 

 evil because we first have good. Both are relative 

 terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if 

 they were something absolute, like gravity or chemi- 

 cal affinity. But are they any more absolute than 

 heat and cold, or than big and little? What pleases 

 us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good, 

 and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our 

 wants and dislikes, our pleasures and our pain, the 

 measure of the universe, as we do mathematics and 

 physics. We can think of things in terms of art and 

 literature, of beauty or ugliness, or in terms of mo- 

 rality and religion, or we may think of them in terms 

 of science and of exact knowledge. When we say 

 they are good or bad, we are thinking of them in 

 terms of morals or of religion; when we say they are 

 beautiful or ugly, we are describing them in terms 

 of aesthetics; when we say they are true or false, 

 real or delusive, we are talking of them in terms of 

 science. 



This sere and prematurely ripened leaf appeals to 

 my literary and imaginative faculties through its 

 beauty and its symbolic character; it appeals to my 

 understanding, my love of accurate knowledge, by 

 reason of the blight that caused its fall. 



Our going out of the world seems equally fortui- 

 tous and haphazard in infancy, youth, middle life, 

 old age; before we have fairly lived, or after life has 



180 



