hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit
out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as
soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can
no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself,
than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or
a light without a shadow. "Drive out Nature with a fork,
she comes running back."

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which
the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags
that he does not know, that they do not touch him;--but
the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul.
If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in
the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life
and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much
death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make
this separation of the good from the tax, that the
experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease
began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the
intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to
see God whole in each object, but is able to see the
sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual
hurt; he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's
tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would have
from that which he would not have. "How secret art thou
who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou
only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence
certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled