experience
becomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might have
been had _he_ enjoyed those other men's opportunities or even (so far
can unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The wholly
different creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would have
existed in that case would still have called itself "I"; and so, the
dreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a different
situation.

If a new birth could still be called by a man's own name, the reason
would be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis
for the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to
fruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as
it realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner and
vaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personal
endowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that even
his uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his
finitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial
idiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in
heaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most
perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he
instinctively craves for himself.

[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.]

It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the
aristocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own nature
the most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble
nobody's dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are
open is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent
suffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not something
comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private
fate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the
moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his
unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can
any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge
or justify that moment's bitterness. The pain may be whistled away and
forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little
coarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with
unrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having
existed; it must remain for ever to trouble God's omniscience an