e,
knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up for
himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to
ride that he may ride; to dress that he may be dressed; to eat that he
may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great; they
would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great
is to possess one side of nature,--the sweet, without the other side,
the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day
it must be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted
water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant
things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as
soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve
things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside
that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. "Drive out
Nature with a fork, she comes running back."

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to
dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do
not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his
soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more
vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it
is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the
retribution is so much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts
to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment
would not be tried,--since to try it is to be mad,--but for the
circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and
separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to
see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement
of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid's head
but not the dragon's tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he
would have from that which he would not have. "How secret art thou
who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God,
sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon
such as have unbridled desires!" {1}

1 St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind;
but havi