The optimistic creed, which the poet strove to teach, must, therefore, not only establish the immanence of God, but show in some way how such immanence is consistent with the existence of particular things.  His doctrine that there is no failure, or folly, or wickedness, or misery, but conceals within it, at its heart, a divine element; that there is no incident in human history which is not a pulsation of the life of the highest, and which has not its place in a scheme of universal good, must leave room for the moral life of man, and all the risks which morality brings with it.  Otherwise, optimism is impossible.  For a God who, in filling the universe with His presence, encroaches on the freedom and extinguishes the independence of man, precludes the possibility of all that is best for man—­namely, moral achievement.  Life, deprived of its moral purpose, is worthless to the poet, and so, in consequence, is all that exists in order to maintain that life.  Optimism and ethics seem thus to come into immediate collision.  The former, finding the presence of God in all things, seems to leave no room for man; and the latter seems to set man to work out his own destiny in solitude, and to give him supreme and absolute authority over his own life; so that any character which he forms, be it good or bad, is entirely the product of his own activity.  So far as his life is culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility.  There may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity.  He is part of a whole, and has his place fixed, and his function predetermined, by a power which is greater than his own.  But, if we are to call him good or evil, if he is to aspire and repent and strive, in a word, if he is to have any moral character, he cannot be merely a part of a system; there must be something within him which is superior to circumstances, and which makes him master of his own fate.  His natural history may begin with the grey dawn of primal being, but his moral history begins with himself, from the time when he first reacted upon the world in which he is placed, and transformed his natural relations into will and character.  For who can be responsible for what he did not will?  What could a moral imperative mean, what could an “ought” signify, to a being who was only a temporary embodiment of forces, who are prior to, and independent of himself?  It would seem, therefore, as if morality were irreconcilable with optimism.  The moral life of man cannot be the manifestation of a divine benevolence whose purpose is necessary; it