and spiritual interests can never abolish or cancel the material
existence on which they are grafted. The consequence is that death, even
when circumvented by reproduction and relieved by surviving impersonal
interests, remains an essential evil. It may be accepted as inevitable,
and the goods its intrusion leaves standing may be heartily appreciated
and pursued; but something pathetic and incomplete will always attach to
a life that looks to its own termination.

The effort of physical existence is not to accomplish anything definite
but merely to persist for ever. The will has its first law of motion,
corresponding to that of matter; its initial tendency is to continue to
operate in the given direction and in the given manner. Inertia is, in
this sense, the essence of vitality. To be driven from that perpetual
course is somehow to be checked, and an external and hostile force is
required to change a habit or an instinct as much as to deflect a star.
Indeed, nutrition itself, hunting, feeding, and digestion, are forced
activities, and the basis of passions not altogether congenial nor
ideal. Hunger is an incipient faintness and agony, and an animal that
needs to hunt, gnaw, and digest is no immortal, free, or essentially
victorious creature. His will is already driven into by-paths and
expedients; his primitive beatific vision has to be interrupted by
remedial action to restore it for a while, since otherwise it would
obviously degenerate rapidly through all stages of distress until its
total extinction.

[Sidenote: Moral acceptance of this compromise.]

The tasks thus imposed upon the protoplasmic will raise it, we may say,
to a higher level; to hunt is better sport, and more enlightening, than
to lie imbibing sunshine and air; and to eat is, we may well think, a
more positive and specific pleasure than merely to be. Such judgments,
however, show a human bias. They arise from incapacity to throw off
acquired organs. Those necessities which have led to the forms of life
which we happen to exemplify, and in terms of which our virtues are
necessarily expressed, seem to us, in retrospect, happy necessities,
since without them our conventional goods would not have come to appeal
to us. These conventional goods, however, are only compromises with
evil, and the will would never have taken to pursuing them if it had not
been dislodged and beaten back from its primary aims. Even food is, for
this reason, no absolute blessing