tea-drinking, tamely good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us.  Stevenson, with his delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional “furlough from the moral law”; and there are times for most of us when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the everlasting “Thou shalt not!” But the daring rebel, the defiant Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life.  There are, in fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of morality: 

(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary.  It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism, that immorality implies.  Our whole civilization, everything that makes human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse without its foundation of moral obedience.  The regime of slashing individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to humanity-a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race.  For who are the weakest, the “hindmost,” but the babies!  Sympathy and love and self sacrifice, at least in parents, are necessary if the race is to endure a generation.  But even for the individual, the penalties of immorality are too obvious to need recapitulation.  If morality is repression, it is the minimal repression consistent with the maintenance of successful and happy life.  Its real aim is to bring life, and life more abundantly.

(2) But if we are looking for something great, for adventure and excitement and battle against odds, we can find it much better than in brutally slashing at our fellows, or running amuck at the beck of our impulses, by putting our valor at the service of some really great human endeavor.  If we want to get into the big game, the great adventure, we must pit ourselves, with the leaders of mankind, against the hostile universe.  The men and women who set our blood tingling and our hearts beating fastest are-Darwin, discoverer by patient labor of a great cosmic law; Pasteur, conqueror at last over a terrible human disease; Peary, first to plant foot upon the axis of the world; Goethals, builder of a canal that links the oceans.  The steady march of a moralized civilization, presenting united front to the cosmos, is infinitely more glorious than the futile, aimless, and petty struggles of an anarchic immorality.  Our half-disciplined life is already far richer and more romantic than the life of Nietzsche’s “supermen” could be; and we are only a little way along the road of moral progress.  The real superman will be a better man, a man of tenderness and chivalry, of loyalty and self-control, a man of disciplined heart and purified will; to attain to such a supermanliness is, indeed, a heroic and splendid achievement, worthy of our utmost endeavor, and calling into play all our noblest powers.