uld have brought nourishment to their souls."

And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. He gave
them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and
without which such freedom would have been useless.

He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final
excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the
average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given
sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome. "The body
dies if it be thwarted. Mind--in other words, intellectual
truth--triumphs through opposition. Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to
it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in
jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. Abstract
thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in
some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the
improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their
hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours."

The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so
necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in
the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best
he can of the lower. But if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude
means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was
once passed on the famous statue of the Laocoon. Some artist had covered
the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central
figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. One man said as he
looked upon it,

"... I think the gesture strives
Against some obstacle we cannot see." (p. 172.)

Every other spectator pronounced the "gesture" a yawn.

Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief
in the ideal. He accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its
scientific sense. He likes the idea of having felt his way up to
humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of
existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. He
likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which
attracts him to all created things. It also completes his vision of
mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held
together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him
in the impression that the personal n