nd. Pleasure is taken out of
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
"Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."[110]

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they
do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the
appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from
himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the
will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected,
so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt;
he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he
can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not
have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"[111]

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme
Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so
bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114]
Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
the key of them.

"Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented to get any c