ter of his
faith in the good. Merely to attribute to him an optimistic creed is to
say very little; for the worth, or worthlessness, of such a creed
depends upon its content--upon its fidelity to the facts of human life,
the clearness of its consciousness of the evils it confronts, and the
intensity of its realism.

There is a sense, and that a true one, in which it may be said that all
men are optimists; for such a faith is implied in every conscious and
deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to
realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously
he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an
ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the
sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an
impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect
without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other stultifies
intellectual activity: and both views imply that the critic has so
escaped the conditions of human life, as to be able to pass a
condemnatory judgment upon them. The belief that a harmonious relation
between the self-conscious agent and the supreme good is possible,
underlies the practical activity of man; just as the belief in the unity
of thought and being underlies his intellectual activity. A moral
order--that is, an order of rational ends--is postulated in all human
actions, and we act at all only in virtue of it,--just as truly as we
move and work only in virtue of the forces which make the spheres
revolve, or think by help of the meaning which presses upon us from the
thought-woven world, through all the pores of sense. A true ethics, like
a true psychology, or a true science of nature, must lean upon
metaphysics, and it cannot pretend to start _ab initio_. We live in the
Copernican age, which puts the individual in a system, in obedience to
whose laws he finds his welfare. And this is simply the assertion of an
optimistic creed, for it implies a harmonious world.

But, though this is true, it must be remembered that this faith is a
prophetic anticipation, rather than acquired knowledge. We are only on
the way towards reconstructing in thought the fact which we are, or
towards bringing into clear knowledge the elemental power which
manifests itself within us as thought, desire, and deed. And, until this
is achieved, we have no full right to an optimistic creed. The
revelati