Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/45

Rh musically. There the experiment was a clever one, but the lines were such as a dispassionate observer (like either of us who should happen not to be the author) could not approve, might even smile at.” These people never precisely quarreled, to my knowledge, at least over their literary criticism. I was not able to make out altogether why they did this sort of thing, but, so far as I could discover, they both liked it, and were the better lovers for it. I conjecture that their delight must have resembled the kind of joy that philosophical students take in analyzing life. Let me admit frankly: it is indeed the joy, if you like, of playing cat and mouse with your dearest other self. It is even somewhat like the joy, if so you choose to declare, which infants take in that primitive form of hide and seek that is suited to their months. “Where is my truth, my life, my faith, my temperament?” says the philosopher. And if, some volumes further on in the exposition of his system, he says, “Oh! there it is,” the healthy babies will be on his side in declaring that such reflections are not wholly without their rational value. But why do I thus apparently degrade speculation by again deliberately comparing it with a game? Because, I answer, in one sense, all consciousness is a game, a series of longings and of reflections which it is easy to call superfluous if witnessed from without. The justification of consciousness is the having of it. And this magnificent play of the spirit with itself, this infantile love of rewinning its own wealth ever anew through deliberate loss, through seeking, and through joyous recognition, what is this, indeed, but the pastime of the divine life itself? We enter into the world of the spirit just when even the tragedy of life becomes for our sight as much a divine game as a divine tragedy, when we know that the world is not only serious, terrible, cruel, but is also a world where a certain grim humor of the gods is at home; when we see in it a world, too, where a serene and childlike confidence is justified, a