The truth is that what the reformers are always seeking, ignorantly or otherwise, is a better balance in things social or mental or moral, less accentuated tendencies of any kind--usually away from the too-gross, although at times away from the too-ascetic also, toward which extremes life appears to swing at times. And what they do is to identify their meager, if equational, perceptions of life with eternal thought or order, and to insist that the half of the balance which they represent is the whole of it. As a rule they are quite unfitted by ignorance as well as by the time mood of which they are the expression to see that without that against which they war neither they nor their divine creator would have the least excuse for existing. To me, not violent extremes of any kind, although these are productive of great suffering at times, but the suave inanity which imagines it wants only unchanging good or, on the other hand, unchanging evil, is the thing to be feared. Fortunately or unfortunately, as one may view this thing, a strictly median condition, while excellent as a haven of refuge from extremes, is nevertheless never wholly or easily attained in life, and never, apparently, seriously desired by it, as an end in itself, and never quite satisfactory. Indeed it is the equivalent of nothingness and would produce just that if the world sought to persist in it. Yet wise Nature is our rescuer in this as in many another plight in which betimes She places us for ends of Her own, for Nature seeks, if She seeks anything, motion, although apparently in no straight line. Her mood, if anything, is synchronic, rhythmic, pendulumic. She wishes, if one may interpret Her wishes from what may be seen here, to swing in a semi-balanced way between extremes of so-called good and evil--never all good and never all evil, but a little of both, or plenty, in order that there may be contention, strife, something to live _about_ and for. These violent extremes of any kind--ascetic, religious, barbaric, or repulsive--which affect life and irritate our souls, or the souls of some of us, are not at all offensive to Nature in Her entirety apparently. She appears to like extremes as well as a median line, the latter as a fence or break between them, and will have nothing of perpetual anything in any one direction. And life, it seems to me, would be more understandable, less disturbing to most of us, if in hours of stress of any kind we were able to realize this--that Nature adores extremes, with always a happy medium as the guiding and dividing line to which She can return and on which She can fix, as the mariner on the North Star. And if some such more liberal conception of God, or force, or life, or the creative impulse, could be introduced, it would be better. What we really need is a better stomach for life as it is, and Nature, in the course of time, may possibly build us such. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE