sary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdroeckh himself
could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
unlimited trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them
piecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself in
them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
vocal with his lamentations. The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic. But, no!
something deep down in Teufelsdroeckh and in the rest of us tells us
that there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
whose sake we must keep up the serious mood. And so the inner fever
and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken.
There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
Contriver of the World." But those times are past; and we of the
nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all
plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
and not a moral {44} universe. To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a
divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, ca