WILL. 547 



obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects, con- 

 siderations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the 

 will, fail to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and un- 

 real. The connection of the reality of things with their 

 effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been 

 fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost 

 wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which nor- 

 mally should hold between vision of the truth and action, 

 and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not at- 

 tach to certain ideas. Men do not differ so much in their 

 mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility 

 and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued 

 from their differing fates. No class of them have better 

 sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between 

 the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless 

 failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, 

 the ' dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction 

 between knowledge and action, and who, with full com- 

 mand of theory, never get to holding their limp characters 

 erect. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge 

 as they do ; as far as moral insight goes, in comparison with 

 them, the orderly and prosperous philistines whom they 

 scandalize are sucking babes. And yet their moral 

 knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the 

 background, — discerning, commenting, jDrotestiug, longing, 

 half resolving, — never wholly resolves, never gets its voice 

 out of the minor into the major key, or its speech out of 

 the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never breaks 

 the spell, never takes the helm into its hands. In such 

 characters as Eousseau and Restif it would seem as if the 

 lower motives had all the impulsive etHcacy in their 

 hands. Like trains with the right of way, they retain ex- 

 clusive possession of the track. The more ideal motives 

 exist alongside of them in profusion, but they never get 

 switched on, and the man's conduct is no more influenced 

 by them than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer 

 standing by the roadside and calling to be taken aboard. 

 They are an inert accompaniment to the end of time ; and 

 the consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from 

 habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of 



