I
Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling12. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth13 and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely14 as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3, and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation15, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.
But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold16 space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards17 and wrecks18 of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady19; swelling20 in tumours21 that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent23 prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering24 into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion25 of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh26 darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire27 for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere28 issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.
In two main shapes this eruption29 covers the countenance30 of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion31 of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal32 mud, and scurrying33 abroad with the myriad34 feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing35 agonies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection36 of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute37; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey38 upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming39 them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian40, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched41 with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds42 through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation43 of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.
II
What a monstrous44 spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber45; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely46 surrounded, savagely descended47, irremediably condemned48 to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely49 childish, often admirably valiant50, often touchingly51 kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary53 life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity54; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude55, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency57, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity58; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends59 itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs60 with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom61 thought:—Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster62, and the louse, of whom we know so little:—But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof63 of a glance, although it were a child’s; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront64 and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted65 practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit56, will strike them senseless for eternity66. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice67, cowardly violence and treacherous68 crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn69. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable70 that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching52 and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished71, our race should not cease to labour.
If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle72, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest73, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured74 to hardship and vile75 pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle76 in a tavern77 and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly78 like a child, constant to toil79, brave to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts80, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world’s scorn with service, often standing81 firm upon a scruple82, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches:—everywhere some virtue cherished or affected83, everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man’s ineffectual goodness:—ah! if I could show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom84; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.
Of all earth’s meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine85, received with screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming86 ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy87 of brutes88, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty89 run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin90 of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious91 tears and perseverance92. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers93, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us—like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle—to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment94, visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they repent95, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping96 hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den22 of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is blotted97 out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.
And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under the imminent98 hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected99, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes—God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans100 in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all in vain.
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1
frailties
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| n.脆弱( frailty的名词复数 )；虚弱；（性格或行为上的）弱点；缺点 | |
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invincible
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| adj.不可征服的，难以制服的 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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congruity
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| n.全等，一致 | |
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tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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bracing
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| adj.令人振奋的 | |
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joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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fungus
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| n.真菌，真菌类植物 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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inversely
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| adj.相反的 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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shards
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| n.（玻璃、金属或其他硬物的）尖利的碎片( shard的名词复数 ) | |
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wrecks
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| n.沉船( wreck的名词复数 )；（事故中）遭严重毁坏的汽车（或飞机等）；（身体或精神上）受到严重损伤的人；状况非常糟糕的车辆（或建筑物等）v.毁坏[毁灭]某物( wreck的第三人称单数 )；使（船舶）失事，使遇难，使下沉 | |
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malady
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| n.病，疾病(通常做比喻) | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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tumours
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| 肿瘤( tumour的名词复数 ) | |
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den
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| n.兽穴；秘密地方；安静的小房间，私室 | |
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abhorrent
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| adj.可恶的，可恨的，讨厌的 | |
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cohering
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| v.黏合( cohere的现在分词 )；联合；结合；（指看法、推理等）前后一致 | |
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profusion
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| n.挥霍；丰富 | |
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marsh
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| n.沼泽，湿地 | |
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aspire
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| vi.(to，after)渴望，追求，有志于 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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eruption
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| n.火山爆发；（战争等）爆发；（疾病等）发作 | |
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countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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inversion
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| n.反向，倒转，倒置 | |
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natal
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| adj.出生的，先天的 | |
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scurrying
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| v.急匆匆地走( scurry的现在分词 ) | |
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myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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projection
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| n.发射，计划，突出部分 | |
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brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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cramming
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| n.塞满，填鸭式的用功v.塞入( cram的现在分词 )；填塞；塞满；（为考试而）死记硬背功课 | |
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vegetarian
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| n.素食者；adj.素食的 | |
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drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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42
scuds
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| v.（尤指船、舰或云彩）笔直、高速而平稳地移动( scud的第三人称单数 ) | |
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43
reverberation
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| 反响； 回响； 反射； 反射物 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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savagely
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| adv. 野蛮地，残酷地 | |
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descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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valiant
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| adj.勇敢的，英勇的；n.勇士，勇敢的人 | |
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touchingly
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| adv.令人同情地，感人地，动人地 | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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solicit
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| vi.勾引；乞求；vt.请求，乞求；招揽(生意) | |
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decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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conformity
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| n.一致，遵从，顺从 | |
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transcends
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| 超出或超越（经验、信念、描写能力等）的范围( transcend的第三人称单数 )； 优于或胜过… | |
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martyrs
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| n.martyr的复数形式；烈士( martyr的名词复数 )；殉道者；殉教者；乞怜者（向人诉苦以博取同情） | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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oyster
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| n.牡蛎；沉默寡言的人 | |
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reproof
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| n.斥责，责备 | |
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affront
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| n./v.侮辱，触怒 | |
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perverted
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| adj.不正当的v.滥用( pervert的过去式和过去分词 )；腐蚀；败坏；使堕落 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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treacherous
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| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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stoutest
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| 粗壮的( stout的最高级 )； 结实的； 坚固的； 坚定的 | |
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inured
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| adj.坚强的，习惯的 | |
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vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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fiddle
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| n.小提琴；vi.拉提琴；不停拨弄，乱动 | |
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tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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affronts
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| n.（当众）侮辱，（故意）冒犯( affront的名词复数 )v.勇敢地面对( affront的第三人称单数 )；相遇 | |
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81
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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82
scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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83
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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84
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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85
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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86
swarming
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| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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87
hierarchy
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| n.等级制度；统治集团，领导层 | |
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88
brutes
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| 兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性 | |
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89
frailty
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| n.脆弱；意志薄弱 | |
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90
margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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91
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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92
perseverance
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| n.坚持不懈，不屈不挠 | |
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93
browsers
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| 浏览器 | |
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94
refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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95
repent
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| v.悔悟，悔改，忏悔，后悔 | |
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96
yelping
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| v.发出短而尖的叫声( yelp的现在分词 ) | |
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97
blotted
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| 涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 )； （用吸墨纸）吸干 | |
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98
imminent
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| adj.即将发生的，临近的，逼近的 | |
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99
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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100
groans
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| n.呻吟，叹息( groan的名词复数 )；呻吟般的声音v.呻吟( groan的第三人称单数 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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