Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/69

Rh would the principle of heredity seem to argue against the reign of justice in the administration of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves quite unable to recognize in the apportionment of pleasure and pain anything like a due ratio of merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that perhaps nature measures life with a larger standard than the individual's short span of existence, and warns us in his essay on "Justice" not to indulge our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways that are utterly beyond our comprehension. After all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds foro conscientiæ in reconciling his cult of self with devotion to the common interest. Morality, in that essay, is defined as the co-ordination of personal desire to the task assigned by nature to the race. And is it not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic concept of morality reduces itself to absurdity through its antagonism to that primal human instinct that makes for the continuity of life?

From the compromise effected between two fairly opposite ethical principles, there emerges in the works of this period something akin to a socialistic tendency. It is organically related to the mystical prepossession of the author's manner