THE CONFLICT IN THE SOUL. I07 



case. We can as yet hardly boast to have dis- 

 covered the solutions to the complex problems of 

 modern life with our reason ; our feelings are con- 

 tinually harking back irrationally to the conditions 

 of a remote antiquity, while our bodies are still more 

 unsuited to the sedentary and intellectual life of 

 civilization. And so we are impelled in contrary 

 directions by the conflicting constituents of our 

 nature, and life becomes a burden to men whose 

 faculties are not competent to perform the functions 

 it requires. It would be but a slight exaggeration 

 of our inability to keep pace with the changes of 

 things to say that our bodies are those of animals, 

 our feelings those of savages, our reason that of men, 

 while our destiny and duties seem those of angels. 

 Thus this internal discord, this conflict between the 

 convictions of the head and the promptings of the 

 heart, between the aspirations of the will and the 

 shackles imposed on them by " the body of this 

 death " is not, as we w^ould fain believe, a transitory 

 symptom of the present age, due to the ascetic 

 superstitions of an effete religion, or, as Mr. Spencer 

 would persuade us, to the survival of military habits 

 in an industrial age, but a necessary and permanent 

 feature, which marks and stains the whole of Evol- 

 ution. Internal non-adaptation Is the inevitable 

 concomitant of life in a changing world, and must 

 exist until Time pass into Eternity. 



§ II. But not only does the intrinsic constitut- 

 ion of things render the pursuit of happiness that of 

 an unattainable ideal, but even the approximations 

 to it, as we fondly call them, are put beyond our 

 reach by the course of events. Happiness can never 

 be attained, and, for all our efforts, the delusive 

 phantom recedes further and further from our eyes. 



