be a match for it if
I will, and not a footless waif,--suffices to make it rational to my
feeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than to
hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse
to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more
powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose
solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will
never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is
indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse
will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will,
and will invent one if one be not given him.

But now observe a most important consequence. Men's active impulses
are so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect for
Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet. In
other words, although one can lay down in advance the {89} rule that a
philosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness,
for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
alien to human nature, can never succeed,--one cannot in advance say
what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things,
the definitely successful philosophy shall contain. In short, it is
almost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt,
and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the
universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
same way. We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold
likes to call _Aberglaube_, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to
eternal variations and disputes.

Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and suppose
for a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearness
and consistency, and that both determine our expectations equally well.
Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
materialism by another. At this very day all sentimental natures, fond
of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith. Why?
Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our
personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with,
what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe essentially
is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
There is no r