, embarrass us
as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble
attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances
of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this
entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which
certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme
Denouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of
circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?

1867.

CONCLUSION*

*This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book,
as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into
whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to
reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my
original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with
the thoughts suggested by it.

Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta khorei kai ouden menei.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or
fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us
begin with that which is without--our physical life. Fix upon it in one
of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious
recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical
life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which
science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and
delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them
in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of
them--the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses
of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of
light and sound--processes which science reduces to simpler and more
elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action
of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out
on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces;
and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the
grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That
clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under
which we group them--a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass
out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but
the concurrence, renewed from moment