this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency.  We aim above the mark, to hit the mark.  Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.  And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;—­how then? is the bird flown?  O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more.  The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual petty madness has incurred.  But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.  She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions,—­an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.  This glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good.  We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts.  Let the Stoics[516] say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.  The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent.  All things betray the same calculated profusion.  The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last.  The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.

12.  But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men.  No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart.  Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.  Not less remarkable is the overfaith