The man of the world, pure and simple, is by far the best practical observer and philosopher with regard to life, because he is not blinded by any prejudices.  He will be found always to believe that as a man sows so shall he reap.  And this is so evidently true when it is considered, that if one takes the larger view, including all human life, it makes intelligible the awful Nemesis which seems consciously to pursue the human race,—­that inexorable appearance of pain in the midst of pleasure.  The great Greek poets saw this apparition so plainly that their recorded observation has given to us younger and blinder observers the idea of it.  It is unlikely that so materialistic a race as that which has grown up all over the West would have discovered for itself the existence of this terrible factor in human life without the assistance of the older poets,—­the poets of the past.  And in this we may notice, by the way, one distinct value of the study of the classics,—­that the great ideas and facts about human life which the superb ancients put into their poetry shall not be absolutely lost as are their arts.  No doubt the world will flower again, and greater thoughts and more profound discoveries than those of the past will be the glory of the men of the future efflorescence; but until that far-off day comes we cannot prize too dearly the treasures left us.

There is one aspect of the question which seems at first sight positively to negative this mode of thought; and that is the suffering in the apparently purely physical body of the dumb beings,—­young children, idiots, animals,—­and their desperate need of the power which comes of any sort of knowledge to help them through their sufferings.

The difficulty which will arise in the mind with regard to this comes from the untenable idea of the separation of the soul from the body.  It is supposed by all those who look only at material life (and especially by the physicians of the flesh) that the body and the brain are a pair of partners who live together hand in hand and react one upon another.  Beyond that they recognise no cause and therefore allow of none.  They forget that the brain and the body are as evidently mere mechanism as the hand or the foot.  There is the inner man—­the soul—­behind, using all these mechanisms; and this is as evidently the truth with regard to all the existences we know of as with regard to man himself.  We cannot find any point in the scale of being at which soul-causation ceases or can cease.  The dull oyster must have that in him which makes him choose the inactive life he leads; none else can choose it for him but the soul behind, which makes him be.  How else can he be where he is, or be at all?  Only by the intervention of an impossible creator called by some name or other.