"There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand," said the doctor, with mingled assent and assertion. "Hence it is forever falling."
"But it is forever renewed," she objected.
"With what renewal?" rejoined Faber. "What return is there from the jaws of death? The individual is gone. A new consciousness is not a renewal of consciousness."
She looked at him keenly.
"It is hard, is it not?" she said.
"I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so," he answered.
She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it.
"Surely," she said, "the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must be."
"How can we tell that?" he returned. "What do we see like it in nature? Whatever lives and thrives—animal or vegetable—or human—it is all one—every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving on the loss, the defeat, the death of another. There is no unity save absolutely by means of destruction. Destruction is indeed the very center and framework of the sole existing unity. I will not, therefore, as some do, call Nature cruel: what right have I to complain? Nature can not help it. She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to blame for being brought forth. Ought is merely the reflex of like. We call ourselves the highest in Nature—and probably we are, being the apparent result of the whole—whence, naturally, having risen, we seek to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher. For as to the system in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor control, save by a poor subservience. We are the slaves of our circumstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what ought to be."
Miss Meredith was silent for a time.