16 HUMANISM i 



shall, in some measure, find. 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. 



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, this we do and must. 



In conclusion let us avow that after professing to 

 discuss the relations of Philosophy and Practice, we 

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

 former, and to have done little more than adumbrate the 

 practical consequences of the new philosophy. In extenu 

 ation we may urge that the stream of Truth which waters 

 the fertile fields of Conduct has its sources in the remote 

 and lonely uplands, inter apices philosophiae, where the cloud- 

 capped crags and slowly grinding glaciers of metaphysics 

 soar into an air too chill and rare for our abiding habita 

 tion, but keenly bracing to the strength of an audacious 



