"There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to
the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the
outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of
nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions
of society, of the emergency of the case with the despotism
of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest
of life, makes the difficulty of living. It is a struggle,
indeed, between unequal powers,--between the man, who is a
conscious moral person, and nature, or events, or bodies of
men, which either want personality or unity; and hence the
man, after fearful and desolating war, sometimes rises on
the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the
prescriptions of society. But what these want in personality
they possess in number, in recurrency, in invulnerability. The
spirit of man, an agent indeed of curious power and boundless
resource, but trembling with sensibilities, tender and
irritable, goes out against the inexorable conditions of
destiny, the lifeless forces of nature, or the ferocious
cruelty of the multitude, and long before the hands are weary
or the invention exhausted, the heart may be broken in the
warfare."