ties, and has a
kind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or
draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so
many forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different
life. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux
makes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is
the ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such
strains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be
required of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all
that enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a
world to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have
created that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfaction
has been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least
postponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the
equilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted
harmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own
perfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep
into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world.
Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of
being potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial
paradise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious
appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is
a piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are
perverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides
to treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety
towards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter that
are wanting for their perfect realisation?

[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.]

Philosophers talk of self-contradiction, but there is evidently no such
thing, if we take for the self what is really vital, each propulsive,
definite strain of being, each nucleus for estimation and for pleasure
and pain. Bach impulse may be contradicted, but not by itself; it may
find itself opposed, in a theatre which it has entered it knows not how,
by violent personages that it has never wished to encounter. The
environment it calls for is congenial with it: and by that environment
it could never be thwarted or condemned. The lumbering course of events
may indeed involve it i