Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
In a world the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror, goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now and again, to discover that it can be."
On the one side, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all possible worlds is little better than a libel on possibility. On behalf of the modified optimism that benevolence is on the whole the regulating principle of the sentient world, it may be granted that there are hosts of subtle contrivances devoted to the production of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; but, if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence? Translating these facts into moral terms, the goodness of the hand that aids Blake's "little lamb" is neutralized by the wickedness of the other hand that eggs on his "tiger burning bright," and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.
On the other side, though this may not be the best of all possible worlds, to say that it is the worst is "mere petulant nonsense." With a courage based on hours and days of personal knowledge, he exclaims:—
There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four—a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant—the burden of life would have been immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these.
Moreover, another fact utterly contradicts the hypothesis that the sentient world is directed by malevolence:—
A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are, to all appearance, unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.
To speak, then, of the course and intention of nature in terms of human thought, we must say that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral. It is a logical process materialized, with pleasures and pains that fall, in most cases, without the slightest reference to moral desert.
From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few centuries, to subdue the masterfulness of this inborn tendency, in part necessary to our existence, to purely ethical ends. So deep rooted is it that the struggle may last till the end of time. But, he exclaims with a ringing note—