the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill
says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be
intolerable. Happily we are not easily deprived of them,
since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable.
And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most
childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most
fruitful of good for the race. To those who have discarded
supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events
the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to
the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does
will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to
think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever
be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere
poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which
fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of
humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe
flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must,
like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root
in our soil.




Chapter Eight: A Gold Day At Silchester


It is little to a man's profit to go far afield if his chief
pleasure be in wild life, his main object to get nearer to the
creatures, to grow day by day more intimate with them, and to
see each day some new thing. Yet the distance has the same