ligible the awful Nemesis which seems
consciously to pursue the human race,--that
inexorable appearance of pain in the midst of
pleasure. The great Greek poets saw this
apparition so plainly that their recorded observation
has given to us younger and blinder
observers the idea of it. It is unlikely that so
materialistic a race as that which has grown
up all over the West would have discovered for
itself the existence of this terrible factor in
human life without the assistance of the older
poets,--the poets of the past. And in this we
may notice, by the way, one distinct value of
the study of the classics,--that the great ideas
and facts about human life which the superb
ancients put into their poetry shall not be
absolutely lost as are their arts. No doubt
the world will flower again, and greater
thoughts and more profound discoveries than
those of the past will be the glory of the men
of the future efflorescence; but until that
far-off day comes we cannot prize too dearly
the treasures left us.

There is one aspect of the question which
seems at first sight positively to negative this
mode of thought; and that is the suffering in
the apparently purely physical body of the
dumb beings,--young children, idiots, animals,--and
their desperate need of the power
which comes of any sort of knowledge to help
them through their sufferings.

The difficulty which will arise in the mind
with regard to this comes from the untenable
idea of the separation of the soul from the
body. It is supposed by all those who look
only at material life (and especially by the
physicians of the flesh) that the body and the
brain are a pair of partners who live together
hand in hand and react one upon another.
Beyond that they recognise no cause and
therefore allow of none. They forget that the
brain and the body are as evidently mere mechanism
as the hand or the foot. There is the
inner man--the soul--behind, using all these
mechanisms; and this is as evidently the truth
with regard to all the existences we know of as
with regard to man himself. We cannot find
any point in the scale of being at which soul-causation
ceases or can cease. The dull oyster
must have that in him which makes him choose
the inactive life he leads; none else can choose
it for him but the soul behind, which makes
him be. How else can he be where he is, or be
at all? Only by the intervention of an impossible
creator called by some name or other.

It is