orldliness is
arrest and absorption in the instrumentalities of life; but
instrumentalities cannot exist without ultimate purposes, and it
suffices to lift the eyes to those purposes and to question the will
sincerely about its essential preferences, to institute a catalogue of
rational goods, by pursuing any of which we escape worldliness. Sense
itself is one of these goods. The sensualist at least is not worldly,
and though his nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is not
lacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract spirituality
in his experience. He is a sort of sprightly and incidental mystic,
treating his varied succession of little worlds as the mystic does his
monotonous universe. Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, by
which physical existence becomes its own reward. In the disciplined play
of fancy which the fine arts afford, the mind's free action justifies
itself and becomes intrinsically delightful. Science not only exercises
in itself the intellectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind,
so that all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the liberal
life extends also to the heart. All these interests, which justify
themselves by their intrinsic fruits, make so many rational episodes and
patches in conventional life; but it must be confessed in all candour
that these are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of life
are irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests remain
irrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense and art, of knowledge
and sympathy, are stretched to the utmost, what part will they cover and
justify of our passions, our industry, our governments, our religion?

It was a signal error in those rationalists who attributed their ideal
retrospectively to nature that they grotesquely imagined that people
were hungry so that they might enjoy eating, or curious in order to
delight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live in
conscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work
originally and fundamentally _a tergo_, that experience and reason are
not the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men will
work disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure;
curiosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves to
foster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a great
fountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and death. When
w