a pathetic
dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's
outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant;
his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,[42] and this
diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards
optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important
respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.

[42] "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend
in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and
cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian
education in humility still rankled in his breast.

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which
looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must
distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or
systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety,
healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately.
In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things
as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one
aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the
other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the
essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil
from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this
might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually
sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows
that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.

In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has
blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its
instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When
happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more
acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain
reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from
whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He
must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to
shut his eyes to it and hush it up.

But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid
and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti
pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take
the phenomenon. It can so often