Is Life Worth Living? It

First... A New Theory Is Attacked As Absurd; Then It Is Admitted To Be True, But Obvious And Insignificant; Finally It Is Seen To Be So Important That Its Adversaries Claim That They Themselves Discovered It.

We Must Frankly Confess, Then, Using Our Empirical Common Sense And Ordinary Practical Prejudices, That In The World That Actually Is, The Virtues Of Sympathy, Charity, And Non-resistance May Be, And Often Have Been, Manifested In Excess. ... You Will Agree To This In General, For In Spite Of The Gospel, In Spite Of Quakerism, In Spite Of Tolstoi, You Believe In Fighting Fire With Fire, In Shooting Down Usurpers, Locking Up Thieves, And Freezing Out Vagabonds And Swindlers.

The Further Limits Of Our Being Plunge, It Seems To Me, Into An Altogether Other Dimension Of Existence From The Sensible And Merely Understandable World. Name It The Mystical Region, Or The Supernatural Region, Whichever You Choose. So Far As Our Ideal Impulses Originate In This Region (and Most Of Them Do Originate In It, For We Find Them Possessing Us In A Way For Which We Cannot Articulately Account), We Belong To It In A More Intimate Sense Than That In Which We Belong To The Visible World, For We Belong In The Most Intimate Sense Wherever Our Ideals Belong.

We Need Only In Cold Blood To Act As If The Thing In Question Were Real And It Will Infallibly End By Growing Into Such A Connection With Our Life That It Will Become Real.

Cramming Seeks To Stamp Things In By Intense Application Immediately Before The Ordeal. But A Thing Thus Learned Can Form But Few Associations.