appears in our consciousness, by which things fulfil the real law of their being.
It is true, the not ourselves, by which things fulfil the real law of their being, extends a great deal beyond that sphere where alone we usually think of it. That is, a man may disserve God, disobey indications, not of our own making, but which appear, if we attend, in our consciousness,—he may disobey, I say, such indications of the real law of our being, in other spheres besides the sphere of conduct. He does disobey them, when he sings a hymn like: My Jesus to know, and feel his blood flow,—or, indeed, like nine-tenths of our hymns,—or when he frames and maintains a blundering and miserable constitution of society, as well as when he commits some plain breach of the moral law. That is, he may disobey them in art and science as well as in conduct. But he attends, and the generality of men attend, almost solely to the indications of a true law of our being as to conduct; and hardly at all to indications, though they as really exist, of a true law of our being on its æsthetic and intelligential side. The reason is, that the moral side, though not more real, is so much larger; taking in, as we have said, at least three-fourths of life. Now, the indications on this moral side of that tendency, not of our making, by which things fulfil the law of their being, we do very much mean to denote and to sum up when we speak of the will of God, pleasing God, serving God. Let us keep firm footing on this basis of plain fact, narrow though it may be.
To feel that one is fulfilling in any way the law of one's being, that one is succeeding and hitting the mark, brings, as we know, happiness; to feel this in regard to so great a thing as conduct, brings, of course, happiness proportionate to the thing's greatness. We have already had Quintilian's witness, how right conduct gives joy. Who could value knowledge more than Goethe? but he marks it as being
