more than a thousand intentions; nor is this that intentions are
valueless, but that the least gesture of goodness, or courage, or
justice, makes demands upon us far greater than a thousand lofty
intentions. Chiromantists pretend that the whole of our life is
engraved on our palm; our life, according to them, being a certain
number of actions which imprint ineffaceable marks on our flesh,
before or after fulfilment; whereas not a trace will be left by
either thoughts or intentions. If I have for many long days
cherished projects of murder or treachery, heroism or sacrifice, my
hand will tell nothing of these; but if I have killed some one--
involuntarily perhaps, imagining he was about to attack me; or if I
have rescued a child from the flames that enwrapped it--my hand will
bear, all my life, the infallible sign of love or of murder.
Chiromancy maybe delusion or not--it matters but little; here we are
concerned with the great moral truth that underlies this
distinction. The place that I fill in the universe will never be
changed by my thought; I shall be as I was to the day of my death;
but my actions will almost invariably move me forwards or backwards
in the hierarchy of man. Thought is a solitary, wandering, fugitive
force, which advances towards us today and perhaps on the morrow
will vanish, whereas every deed presupposes a permanent army of
ideas and desires which have, after lengthy effort, secured foot-
hold in reality.

62. But we find ourselves here far away from the noble Antigone and
the eternal problem of unproductive virtue. It is certain that
destiny--understood in the ordinary sense of the word as meaning the
road that leads only to death--is wholly disregardful of virtue.
This is the gulf, to which all systems of morality must come, as to
a central reservoir, to be purified or troubled for ever; and here