hey stood for definite truths; but seeing that they
are as alien to truth as to actual life, they should be ruthlessly
swept aside. I have shown elsewhere that our experience fails to
detect the most minute trace of justice in the phenomena of heredity;
or, in other words, that it fails to discover the slightest moral
connection between the cause: the fault of the father, and the effect:
the punishment or reward of the child.

The poet has the right to fashion hypotheses, and to forge his way
ahead of reality. But it will often happen that when he imagines
himself to be far in advance, he will truly have done no more than turn
in a circle; that where he believes that he has discovered new truth,
he has merely strayed on to the track of a buried illusion. In the
case I have named, for the poet to have taught us more than experience
teaches, he should have ventured still further, perhaps, in the
negation of justice. But whatever our opinion may be on this point, it
at least is clear that the poet who desires his hypotheses to be
legitimate, and of service, must take heed that they be not too
manifestly contrary to the experience of everyday life; for in that
case they become useless and dangerous--scarcely honourable even, if
the error be deliberately made.

30

And now, what are we to conclude from all this? Many things, if one
will, but this above all: that it behoves the "interpreter of life," no
less than those who are living that life, to exercise greatest care in
their manner of handling and admitting mystery, and to discard the
belief that whatever is noblest and best in life or in drama must of
necessity rest in the part that admits of no explanation. There are
many most beautiful, most human, most admirable works which are almost
entirely free from this "disquiet of universal mystery." We derive no
greatness, sublimity, or depth from unceasingly fixing our thoughts on
the infinite and the unknown. Such meditation becomes truly helpful
only when it is the unexpected reward of the mind that has loyally,
unreservedly, given itself to the study of the finite and the knowable;
and to such a mind it will soon be revealed how strangely different is
the mystery which precedes what one does not know from the mystery that
follows closely on what one has learned. The first would seem to
contain many sorrows, but that is only because the sorrows are grouped
there too closely, and have their home upon two of thr