Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/413

Rh deference to that, which is generating, than worldly justice, which does not allow the judge and hangman to lay hold on a woman with child. —Whither is this philosophy bound with all its round-about ways? Does it do more than translating as it were into reason a steady and strong craving—a craving for the mild sun, bright and bracing air, southern plants, sea-breezes, occasional food of meat, eggs, and fruit, hot water as beverage, quiet rambles for whole days, little talking, rare and cautions reading, solitary dwelling, clean, simple, and almost soldier-like habits—in short, for all things which are most tasteful and most salubrious especially to me? A philosophy which in the main is the craving for a personal dict? A craving which longs for my air, my height, my temperature, my kind of health, by the round-about way of my head? There are many other and certainly many loftier sublimities of philosophy, and not only such as are gloomier and more pretentious than mine—perhaps they are, taking them altogether, nothing but intellectual circumscriptions of the same kind of personal cravings ? Meanwhile, I look with a new eye upon the quiet and lonely flight of a butterfly high on the rocky banks of the sea where many good plants we growing: it flies about, unconcerned about the fact that it will live but the life of one more day, and that