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��INTRODUCTION

��P.S. There is little that you will remember here, save the old house and me. Yet you will readily acquiesce in the loss of old associations, when you see how much we are improving the opportunity for newer and more inter- esting ones. Indeed, the future I ever look onward to, though it discloses so little. The past offers much to disgust, and I dwell but little on retrospection. But Imagination and Reason both join in the faith that the greatest powers cannot fail to be the best. They therefore dare ask for nothing, save that all may be what it is des- tined to be ; so that even to wish seems almost an im- piety, and Right so foredoomed to reign that one man has a right to command the universe, if that go wrong and he be still in harmony with Right.

��With that noble conclusion, this series of extracts might well conclude. For it supplies the needed correction of his own words, as given above in his letter of March 1 3, 1863 : "As for what you say of man's moral and religious nature being a test of truth in fact, I think it no more so than that Hope and Imagination are tests of fact. Both indicate only faculties." If "Right " is known to be "so foredoomed to reign that one man has a right to command the universe, if that go wrong and he be still in harmony with Right," then it would follow necessarily that man's moral and religious nature, through which alone that fore- doomed reign of Right can be made known to us, becomes itself the test of truth with respect to that supreme fact of facts. Solely through the Moral Law in Man, taken as the object of rational consideration, can we know the Moral Law in Nature, as its necessary condition, ground, or rea- son ; solely through the ethical organization of the individ-

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