human race to perpetual
torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his
infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that
might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them.
A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we
understood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that
pursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical
expression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a
mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another
man seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take
for granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh
when we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that
introduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.

[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.]

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not
prevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in
arbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as
reasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be
more. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe
is not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view
everything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life
is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little
importance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane
demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not
be unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality
that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by
conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by
mechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are
tentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital
equilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no
theory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive
euphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we
find: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance
in some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the
physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a
natural prosperity.

CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of ex