ok. This is said
sovereignly by _not_ being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm
only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a
certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to
asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last
persuasion lies in assumptions,--not in assumptions made consciously and
with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and
even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power
assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he
will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of
the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"--nor even, "God is our
Father,"--nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit
basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they
build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close
epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new
truth to this degree,--made it for him an _inevitable_ assumption--then
there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to
Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and
is a soul of eloquence in his book.

Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment.
Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of
every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all,
to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a
sovereign energy, into his heart,--and then, as it were, compelling his
heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was
an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed,
he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless
questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme
function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one
thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made
his chief reproach.

No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we
here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless
eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the
fact _is_. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad;
if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once,
equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary,
encountered