ecures the greatest distinctness in thought together with the greatest
decision, wisdom, and ease in action, as the lightning is brilliant and
quick. It also secures, so far as human energies avail, its own
perpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within and without lasts
long and goes far.

[Sidenote: Inchoate ethics.]

To confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is not
unnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but can imagine
neither the cause nor the fruits of that portentous commotion. All
functions, in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It is
then supposed that what serves no further purpose can have no value, and
that he who suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and no life. To
attain an ideal seems to destroy its worth. Moral life, at that low
level, is a fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane and
liberal interests. The barbarian's intensity is without seriousness and
his passion without joy. His philosophy, which means to glorify all
experience and to digest all vice, is in truth an expression of pathetic
innocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning
hand, to assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be anything but
glorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one who has never seen
anything worth seeing nor loved anything worth loving. Immaturity could
go no farther than to acknowledge no limits defining will and happiness.
When such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an authoritative
ideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happiness
becomes at once definite and attainable; for adjustment is possible to a
world that has a fruitful and intelligible structure.

Such incoherences, which might well arise in ages without traditions,
may be preserved and fostered by superstition. Perpetual servile
employments and subjection to an irrational society may render people
incapable even of conceiving a liberal life. They may come to think
their happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear the
large emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world. Like the prisoner of
Chillon, after so long a captivity, they would regain their freedom with
a sigh. The wholesome influences of nature, however, would soon revive
their wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision of
perfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer air. Freedom
and perfection are synonymous with