Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/599

Rh this; he trusts himself to the open sea, because he knows that he is pretty well matched against the necessity he provokes, though he cannot know that he is the superior because he can calculate a good many of the dangers, though not all.

This is the case in each of the separate undertakings that make up life. To each of them belongs its appropriate knowledge, upon which our equanimity and repose of mind, as far as the particular undertaking is concerned, depend. But life itsefitself [sic], taken as a whole, is an undertaking. Life itself has its objects which make it interesting to us, which lead us to bear the burden of it. These objects, like those minor ones, are only to be attained by a struggle between the power Will and the weight Nature, and in this struggle also both energy and success depend upon a certain knowledge which may enable us to apply the power with advantage. But the knowledge required in this case is of a more general kind; it is not a knowledge confined to certain sets of phenomena, and giving us a power correspondingly limited, but it is a general knowledge of the relation in which human life stands to the universe, and of the means by which life may be brought into the most satisfactory adaptation to it. Now, by what name shall we call this knowledge?

Every one has his general views of human life, which are more or less distinct. Upon these general views more than upon any thing else connected with the understanding depends the character of every one's life. Morality is theoretically independent of all such views, but practically and in the long-run it varies with them. What has life to give? How far does it lend itself to our ideals? These are practically questions quite as important to morality as those which lie within the province of morality itself—as the questions, what are or what ought to be our ideals? They are also quite as important to human happiness as all particular measures contrived to increase human happiness. No man fights with any heart if he thinks he has Nature against him. If a man believes that men are not made to be happy, he will lose the energy to do even what can be done for their happiness; he will give up the pursuit of virtue if he meets with more than a certain degree of discouragement in it.

Of an unfavorable view of human life there are three principal consequences—crime, languor, and suicide. The majority of crimes, and still more of meannesses, it seems to me, are not committed from bad intentions, but from a despair of human life. "I am sorry, but I must do it; I am driven to it; everybody has to do it; we must look at things as they are;" these are the reflections which lead men into breaches of morality. "Sic vivitur," says Cicero, selling Tullia. The feeling that life will not allow people to do always what is right, faint perhaps in each individual mind, grows strong when many who share it come together: it grows stronger by being uttered, stronger still by being acted upon; it creates an atmosphere of laxity; morality