your trust or mistrust,--both universes having been only _maybes_, in this particular, before you contributed your act. Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically {60} much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you _the liver_. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the _ultimatum_. Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of-- "Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas." Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_. This life is worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?