em--then, indeed, a life according to
reason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of those
fond assumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria.
Virtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompous
garment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full of
spots and ridiculous patches. Men's best laid plans become, in the
casual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterest
calamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say the
ways of God, but our own ways?"

[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them.]

Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever
positive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives
cannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not
collapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of
criticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not
pre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or
less explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least
imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an
intolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter
of fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never
eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of
the natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the
rest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that
natural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which it
reacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope--the appeal
to some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter
change in the conditions of life.

Post-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention if not in fact, a
criticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rational
morality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is
an effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some single
eventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that by
estranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment's pleasure,
or mortifying the passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or
studying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gain
admission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought,
once conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted