Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/600

582 retires more and more out of view; until the thought of crime itself, and even of enormous crime, becomes familiar, and at last is carried almost unconsciously into act. It is not, then, from want of morality that men do wrong, but from want of another sort of knowledge. They know what is right and what is wrong; it is not from overlooking this distinction that they fall into the wrong, nor would they escape the danger by reflecting upon it ever so much. What determines their action is a belief in some sort of necessity, some fatality with which it is vain to struggle; it is a general view of human life as unfavorable to ideals.

Another such general view of human life produces apathy. A man who has persuaded himself that we are the creatures of circumstances, or that we are the victims of laws with which it is impossible for us to cope, will give up the battle with Nature and do nothing. Perhaps he has his head full of instances of the best endeavors after happiness failing entirely, or by some fatality producing extreme unhappiness; of the purest and noblest labors producing mischief which complete inactivity would have avoided; how Queen Isabella introduced the Inquisition; how Las Casas initiated the slave-trade; how pauperism has been over and over again fostered by philanthropy; how the Prince of Peace himself, according to his own saying, brought a sword upon the earth. He may think that human life, as it runs on naturally, is not a bad thing, but that all attempts to control it or improve it are hopeless; that all high ideals are merely ambitious; that purpose and, still more, system and all sophistication of life are mischievous. And so he may come to renounce all free-will, he may resign himself to the current of ordinary affairs, and become a mere conventionalist, reconciling himself to whatever he does not like, and gradually induced to tolerate with complete indifference the most enormous evils. Against such a perversion of mind morality is no defense; what is needed is not anew view of what ought to be—such a man knows well enough what ought to be—but a new view of what can or may be, a more encouraging view of the universe.

Sometimes the despair of human life goes to a much greater length. Human, life is a game at which we are not forced to play; we may at any time throw up the cards. That only a few do so proves that more or less distinctly most of us have a general view of life not altogether unfavorable. We are for the most part hardly aware of this general view, because it is always the same. We should become painfully aware of it if it were suddenly to change. There is, as it were, a suicide-mark below which our philosophy is always liable to sink. If we came to think life irreconcilably opposed to our ideals, and at the same time were enthusiastically devoted to our ideals, life would become intolerable to us. If our sense of the misery or emptiness of life became for some reason much more keen than it is, life would at last become intolerable to us. With individuals one of these two things is constantly taking place; they might just as well take place with