Thus also, if by a sudden catastrophe we lose somebody who is important
to us, we grieve, but we control ourselves, recognising one of those
hazards of destiny from which not even millionaires are exempt. And the
result on our Ego is usually to improve it in essential respects. But
there are other strokes of destiny, other facts of the universe,
against which we protest as a child protests when deprived of the moon.

Take the case of an individual with an imperfect idea of honesty. Now,
that individual is the consequence of his father and mother and his
environment, and his father and mother of theirs, and so backwards to
the single-celled protoplasm. That individual is a result of the cosmic
order, the inevitable product of cause and effect. We know that. We must
admit that he is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower of rain
or a storm at sea that swallows a ship. We freely grant in the abstract
that there must be, at the present stage of evolution, a certain number
of persons with unfair minds. We are quite ready to contemplate such an
individual with philosophy--until it happens that, in the course of the
progress of the solar system, he runs up against ourselves. Then listen
to the outcry! Listen to the continual explosions of a righteous man
aggrieved! The individual may be our clerk, cashier, son, father,
brother, partner, wife, employer. We are ill-used! We are being treated
unfairly! We kick; we scream. We nourish the inward sense of grievance
that eats the core out of content. We sit down in the rain. We decline
to think of umbrellas, or to run to shelter.

We care not that that individual is a fact which the universe has been
slowly manufacturing for millions of years. Our attitude implies that we
want eternity to roll back and begin again, in such wise that we at any
rate shall not be disturbed. Though we have a machine for the
transmutation of facts into food for our growth, we do not dream of