The Buried Temple | Page 6

shall find that the part we assign to the injustice of fate will be less by
fully two-thirds. And the benefit to mankind would be far more
considerable than if it lay in our power to guide the storm or govern the
heat and the cold, to direct the course of disease or the avalanche, or
contrive that the sea should display an intelligent regard to our virtues
and secret intentions. For indeed the poor far exceed in number those
who fall victims to shipwreck or material accident, just as far more
disease is due to material wretchedness than to the caprice of our
organism, or to the hostility of the elements.
11
And for all that, we love justice. We live, it is true, in the midst of a
great injustice; but we have only recently acquired this knowledge, and
we still grope for a remedy. Injustice dates such a long way back; the
idea of God, of destiny, of Nature's mysterious decrees, had been so
closely and intimately associated with it, it is still so deeply entangled
with most of the unjust forces of the universe, that it was but yesterday
that we commenced the endeavour to isolate such elements contained
within it as are purely human. And if we succeed; if we can distinguish

them, and separate them for all time from those upon which we have no
power, justice will gain more than by all that the researches of man
have discovered hitherto. For indeed in this social injustice of ours, it is
not the human part that is capable of arresting our passion for equity; it
is the part that a great number of men still attribute to a god, to a kind
of fatality, or to imaginary laws of Nature.
12
This last inactive part shrinks every day. Nor is this because the
mystery of justice is about to disappear. A mystery rarely disappears; as
a rule, it only shifts its ground. But it is often most important and most
desirable that we should bring about this change of abode. It may be
said that two or three such changes almost stand for the whole progress
of human thought: the dislodgment of two or three mysteries from a
place where they did harm, and their transference to a place where they
become inoffensive and capable of doing good. Sometimes even, there
is no need for the mystery to change its place; we have only to identify
it under another name. What was once called "the gods," we now term
"life." And if life be as inexplicable as were the gods, we are at least the
gainers to the extent that none has the right to speak or do wrong in its
name. The aim of human thought can scarcely be to destroy mystery, or
lessen it, for that seems impossible. We may be sure that the same
quantity of mystery will ever enwrap the world, since it is the quality of
the world, as of mystery, to be infinite. But honest human thought will
seek above all to determine what are the veritable irreducible mysteries.
It will endeavour to strip them of all that does not belong to them, that
is not truly theirs, of the additions made by our errors, our fears, and
our falsehoods. And as the artificial mysteries vanish, so will the ocean
of veritable mystery stretch out further and further: the mystery of life,
its aim and its origin; the mystery of thought; the mystery that has been
called "the primitive accident," or the "perhaps unknowable essence of
reality."
13
Where had men conceived the mystery of justice to lodge? It pervaded
the world. At one moment it was supposed to rest in the hands of the

gods, at another it engulfed and mastered the gods themselves. It had
been imagined everywhere except in man. It had dwelt in the sky, it had
lurked behind rocks, it had governed the air and the sea, it had peopled
an inaccessible universe. Then at last we peered into its imaginary
retreats, we pressed close and examined; and its throne of clouds
tottered, it faded away; but at the very moment we believed it had
ceased to be, behold it reappeared, and raised its head once more in the
very depths of our heart; and yet another mystery had sought refuge in
man, and embodied itself in him. For it is in ourselves that the
mysteries we seek to destroy almost invariably find their last shelter
and their most fitting abode, the home which they had forsaken, in the
wildness of youth, to voyage through space; as it is in ourselves that we
must learn to meet and to question them. And truly it is no less
wonderful, no less inexplicable, that man should have