The Nuptial Flight 
and unconcernedly marks out the path 
afresh, 
88 
She eludes us on every side ; she repudiates 
most of our rules, and breaks our standards 
to pieces. On our right she sinks far be- 
neath the level of our thoughts, on our left 
she towers mountain-high above them. She 
appears to be constantly blundering, no less 
in the world of her first experiments than 
in that of her last, of man. There she 
invests with her sanction the instincts of 
the obscure mass, the unconscious injustice 
of the multitude, the defeat of intelligence 
and virtue, the uninspired morality which 
urges on the great wave of the race, though 
manifestly inferior to the morality that could 
be conceived or desired by the minds com- 
posing the small and the clearer wave that 
ascends the other. And yet, can such a 
mind be wrong if it ask itself whether the 
whole truth—moral truths, therefore, as well 
as non-moral—had not better be sought in 
this chaos than in itself, where these truths 
would seem comparatively clear and precise? 
253 
