Is there need of illusion to keep alive our desire for good? then
must this desire stand confessed as foreign to the nature of man. It
is a mistake to imagine that the heart will long cherish within it
the ideas that reason has banished; but within the heart there is
much that reason may take to itself. And at last the heart becomes
the refuge to which reason is apt to fly, ever more and more simply,
each time that the night steals upon it; for it is to the heart as a
young, clairvoyant girl, who still at times needs advice from her
blind, but smiling, mother. There comes a moment in life when moral
beauty seems more urgent, more penetrating, than intellectual
beauty; when all that the mind has treasured must be bathed in the
greatness of soul, lest it perish in the sandy desert, forlorn as a
river that seeks in vain for the sea.
75. But let us exaggerate nothing when dealing with wisdom, though
it be wisdom itself. The external forces, we know, will not yield to
the righteous man; but still he is absolute lord of most of the
inner powers; and these are for ever spinning the web of nearly all
our happiness and sorrow. We have said elsewhere that the sage, as
he passes by, intervenes in countless dramas.
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