in me, but something far easier to bear." Thou hast made of him a ghost, as the imprudent man makes of his future self a ghost. Even when thou hast feared his scorn, his hate, his contempt, thou hast not fully made him for thee as real as thyself. His laughter at thee has made thy face feel hot, his frowns and clenched fists have cowed thee, his sneers have made thy throat feel choked. But that was only the social instinct in thee. It was not a full sense of his reality. Even so the little baby smiles back at one that smiles at it, but not because it realizes the approving joy of the other, only because it by instinct enjoys a smiling face; and even so the baby is frightened at harsh speech, but not because it realizes the other's anger. So, dimly and by instinct, thou has lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast even desired his pain, but thou hast not fully realized the pain that thou gavest. It has been to thee, not pain in itself, but the sight of his submission, of his tears, or of his pale terror. Of thy neighbor thou hast made a thing, no Self at all.

When thou hast loved, hast pitied, or hast reverenced thy neighbor, then thy feeling has possibly raised for a moment the veil of illusion. Then thou hast known what he truly is, a Self like thy present Self. But thy selfish feeling is too strong for thee. Thou hast forgotten soon again what thou hadst seen, and hast made even of thy beloved one only the instrument of thy own pleasure. Even out of thy power to pity thou hast made an object of thy vainglory. Thy reverence has turned again to pride. Thou hast accepted the illusion once more. No wonder that in this darkness thou findest selfishness the only rule of any meaning for thy conduct. Thou forgottest that without realization of thy future and as yet unreal self, even selfishness means nothing. Thou forgottest that if thou gavest thy present thought even so to the task of realizing thy neighbor's life, selfishness would seem no more plain to thee than the love of thy neighbor.

Have done then with this illusion that thy Self is all in all. Intuition tells thee no more about thy future Self than it tells thee about thy neighbors. Desire, bred in thee by generations of struggle for existence, emphasizes the expectation of thy own bodily future, the love for thy own bodily welfare, and makes thy body's life seem alone real. But simply try to know the truth. The truth is that all this world of life about thee is as real as thou art. All conscious life is conscious in its own measure. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee. The result of thy insight will be inevitable. The illusion vanishing, the glorious prospect opens before thy vision. Seeing the oneness of this life everywhere, the equal reality of all its moments, thou wilt be ready to treat it all with the reverence that prudence would have thee show to thy own little bit of future life. What prudence in its narrow respectability counseled, thou wilt be ready to do universally. As the prudent man, seeing the reality of his future self, inevitably works for it; so the enlightened man, seeing the reality of all conscious life, realizing that it is no shadow, but fact, at once and inevitably desires, if only for that one moment of insight, to enter into the service of the whole of it.

So the illusion of selfishness vanishes for thy present thought (alas! not for thy future conduct, O child of passion!), when thou lookest at what selfishness has so long hidden from thee. Thou seest now the universal life as a whole, just as real as thou art, identical in joy and sorrow. The conflict of

selfishness and unselfishness vanishes. Selfishness is but a half realization of the truth expressed in unselfishness. Selfishness says: I shall exist. Unselfishness says: The Other Life is as My Life. To realize another's pain as pain is to cease to desire it in itself. Hatred is illusion. Cowardly sympathy, that hides its head for fear of realizing the neighbor's pain, is illusion. But unselfishness is the realization of life. Unselfishness leads thee out of the mists of blind self-adoration, and shows thee, in all the life of nature about thee, the one omnipresent, conscious struggle for the getting of the desired. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's power; in the boundless sea, where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in the hearts of all the good and loving; in the dull, throbbing hearts of all prisoners and captives; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope; in all our devotion; in all our knowledge, - everywhere from the lowest to the noblest creatures and experiences on our earth, the same conscious, burning, willful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thy own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and forget it as thou canst; but if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.

VI.

But this unity that the moral insight has found for us in life must not be falsely interpreted. Rightly interpreted, the moral insight will solve for us many very difficult problems; but we must not imagine that it shows us all this individual life as in any mystical sense already actually in the harmony that we seek. Not because these aims are already in themselves one, but because we, as moral seers, unite in one moment of insight the realization of all these aims, for that reason alone is this life one for us. It is in this sense alone that the moral insight gives us a solution of the problem of egoism and altruism, as well as a foundation for a general doctrine of the Highest Good. The moral insight does not enable us to say: These beings have always actually but blindly sought what was in itself the Highest Good. We can only say: Each one has sought in his blindness only what was to him desirable. And not, save by the realization of the conflict of desire, can the truly highest good be conceived. The moral insight discovers harmony not as already implied in the nature of these blind, conflicting wills, but as an ideal to be attained by hard work.

We point this out in order to show that we do not fall into the hackneyed error of those moralists who insist that they merely tell men what one thing it is that men have all been blindly seeking. Such moralists often say: "Our system is but an expression of the tendency that was always there, latent in men. It tells them in plain words what they always wanted, and then it tells them how to get this end." This specious pretense of so many moral systems we have implicitly condemned in the previous part of our discourse. It constitutes in many cases that appeal to the physical facts which we have set aside as always useless and often ungrounded. If one looks the pretense fairly in the face, how flat and stale it seems! Yonder vast wealth of conflicting aims among men, base and noble, devilish and divine, - what moralist has been able to sum all of them up in any formula, save in the wholly abstract formula that we have above referred to, namely, that all these beings seek what seems to them desirable. How presumptuous to say to them: "In fact you all desire this that I formulate in my text-book of morals." In fact they do not. And it is absurd to watch the turnings and twistings of language by which a moralist tries to make out that they do. For instance, let the moralist be J. S. Mill, and let him declare, as he does, that happiness is the one goal of all men. If happiness includes the attainment of any possible object of anybody's desire, then indeed the theory is a truism. But with this truism, of course, no sort of progress would have been made in ethics. Mill must tell us something about what