106 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



by the treachery of seeming friends, by the general 

 meanness and baseness of their human environment. 

 There are still survivors of the species of Swift, whose 

 proud natures become converted to universal gall, less 

 by the crosses and disappointments of life than from 

 their painful experience of their kind ; and such, not the 

 worst specimens of their species, having received many 

 of the evils they suffer directly from their fellows, and 

 reasoning from the part to the whole of humanity, under 

 the smart of their sufferings, which perverts their judg- 

 ment, though it gives venom to their satire, come at last, 

 like Swift, to feel contempt and scorn, rising at times to 

 hatred, for their species, and to doubt or deny the possi- 

 bility of any real virtue or goodness in man or in woman. 



And at certain moments of funereal hue, do we not 

 all take sides with the cynics and contemners of our 

 species ? How else explain the pleasure felt in the dark 

 and malignant . portrait of man drawn by Swift ; the 

 higher pleasure in the splendid cynicism which breaks 

 forth from some of Shakespeare's'' nobler characters, the 

 Hamlets, Lears, Macbeths, and Timons ; nay, the lurking 

 satisfaction at the terrible denial of virtue by his baser 

 ones, his lagos and Falstaffs ? " Works of art," it will be 

 said, "and art, catholic in her selection of subject, pleases 

 by the portraiture of an lago as well as of a Brutus, the 

 pleasure coming from the superiority of the art dis- 

 played." But still, our engaged sympathies with these 

 denunciations of men and this denial of goodness, testify 

 to something deeper, to some flaw in human nature, or 

 defect or taint in human virtue ; to this and to a secret 

 consciousness of our weakness as well as scorn of it, the 

 last feeling being the one redeeming fact which the 

 mental analysis discloses. 



And, indeed, what poor stuff our vaunted virtues, as 



