e foe of the spirit is worldliness.]

Worldly minds bristle with conventional morality (though in private they
may nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they are
rational in everything except first principles. They consider the
voluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they notice
the spiritual man at all--for he is easily ignored--they regard him as a
useless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraically
with symbols for known and unknown quantities which only in the end
resume their concrete values, so that the journeymen and vulgar
middlemen of the world know only conventional goods. They are lost in
instrumentalities and are themselves only instruments in the Life of
Reason. Wealth, station, fame, success of some notorious and outward
sort, make their standard of happiness. Their chosen virtues are
industry, good sense, probity, conventional piety, and whatever else has
acknowledged utility and seemliness.

[Sidenote: The case for and against pleasure.]

In its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is perfectly
right. Sensuous living (and I do not mean debauchery alone, but the
palpitations of any poet without art or any mystic without discipline)
is not only inconsequential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and to
sincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or reverts to it
entirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And humanity is tormented and
spoilt when, as more often happens, a man disbelieving in reason and out
of humour with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimseys and
passions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so many ill-bred
children. Nevertheless, compared with the worldling's mental mechanism
and rhetoric, the sensualist's soul is a well of wisdom. He lives
naturally on an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free and
concrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and he has sincere
satisfactions. He is less often corrupt than primitive, and even when
corrupt he finds some justification for his captious existence. He
harvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, may
have the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles.
His experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting and
has some human pathos; it is easier to make a saint out of a libertine
than out of a prig. True, the libertine is pursued, like the animals, by
unforeseen tortures, decay, and abandonment, and h