ON MAN AND HIS DEVELOPMENT. 81 



Love, truth, and beauty are the chief needs of the 

 higher nature of man. Of all we may have more and 

 of better quality, from our more developed capacity of 

 soul, than was possible to men in ruder ages ; but yet 

 we feel that of all we are in some way stinted, and that 

 Nature is niggard to a degree, with all her occasional 

 intimations of boundless wealth. These great and good 

 things are all around us ; the capacities to feel and to 

 enjoy them are within us ; what hinders us, then, that we 

 cannot get them ? It sometimes seems as if we had but 

 to open our eyes to see everywhere beauty ; to think 

 boldly and honestly for an hour to stand in the very 

 presence of Truth ; to stretch forth merely our hand to 

 make love and friendship and happiness our own; and 

 yet how we manage for the most part to miss them all 

 nay, worse, to lose them often when within our very 

 hands ! What fatality or malign power, we ask, is at 

 work against us, that the most great and glorious things 

 should be without us, within us, and all around us, and 

 yet that they fly us, as water the lip of Tantalus ? What 

 may be the cause, we must again ask, of our so frequent 

 failure to secure the good, and of our fatality to incur 

 the evil ? May it be, after all, that the cause lies greatly 

 in us, and is removable ; that the fault lies not in our 

 evil stars, nor in things, but in ourselves, that so much 

 amiss happens to us ; that a truer estimate of ourselves 

 and of the inevitable conditions of life, a corrector know- 

 ledge of the terms of what Butler calls our Natural 

 Government, and which Science has for a long time been 

 engaged in ascertaining more clearly for us, might place 

 us in a better position for securing happiness, or at 

 least give us a more commanding ground of vantage for 

 ascertaining what amount and degree of happiness is 

 possible and legitimate to aim at, and what, on the other 



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