pathos of humanity, and,
being unable to visualise human life as it is actually or ideally, they
surrender themselves to indiscriminate pity, doing a little good thereby
and a vast deal of harm. The second class includes the theoretical
socialists and other regenerators of society whose imagination has been
perverted by crude vapours and false visions. They are ignorant of the
real springs of human action; they have wilfully turned their faces away
from the truth as it exists, and their punishment is to dwell in a
fantastic dream of their own creating which works a madness in the brain.
They are to-day what the religious fanatics were in the Middle Ages,
having merely substituted a paradise on this earth for the old paradise in
the heavens. They are as cruel and intolerant as the inquisitors, though
they mask themselves in formulae of universal brotherhood.

LII

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's.
It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that
exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of
the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by
destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections
it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who
has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As
with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate
oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the
regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping
his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure
with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to
think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled
along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted
by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his
book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the
proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying
the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his
life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that
of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they
gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He
looked upon the world a