Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

yEs Triplex i6i
there is not a man on earth who has flown
so high into abstraction as to have any
practical guess at the meaning of the word
life. All literature, from Job and Omar
Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whit-
man, is but an attempt to look upon the
human state with such largeness of view as
shall enable us to rise from the consideration
of living to the Definition of Life. And our
sages give us about the best satisfaction in
their power when they say that it is a vapour,
or a show, or made out of the same stuff
with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid
sense, has been at the same work for ages ;
and after a myriad bald heads have wagged
over the problem, and piles of words have
been heaped one upon another into dry and
cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has
the honour of laying before us, with modest
pride, her contribution towards the subject :
that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensa-
tion. Truly a fine result ! A man may
very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman ;
but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility
M