He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome.  “The body dies if it be thwarted.  Mind—­in other words, intellectual truth—­triumphs through opposition.  Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined.  Abstract thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours.”

The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in the flesh:  he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best he can of the lower.  But if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was once passed on the famous statue of the Laocoon.  Some artist had covered the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central figure, with nothing to explain its contortions.  One man said as he looked upon it,

                       “...  I think the gesture strives
       Against some obstacle we cannot see.” (p. 172.)

Every other spectator pronounced the “gesture” a yawn.

Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief in the ideal.  He accepts the doctrine of evolution:  though not in its scientific sense.  He likes the idea of having felt his way up to humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in.  He likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which attracts him to all created things.  It also completes his vision of mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the natural life are paramount.

As he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness steals over him that he has been washing himself very white; and that his self-defence has been principally self-praise—­at least, to his listener’s ears.  So he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might have been no less censured for the opposite.  He imagines that his life has been written by some romancing historian of the Thiers and Victor Hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or SAGACITY, is made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not.