Hollister could no longer believe that goodness and badness were
wholly matters of free will. From the time he put on the king's
uniform in a spirit of idealistic service down to the day he met Doris
Cleveland on the steamer, his experience had been a succession of
devastating incidents. What had happened to him had happened to
others. Life laid violent hands on them and tossed them about like
frail craft on a windy sea. The individual was caught in the vortex of
the social whirlpool, and what he did, what he thought and felt, what
he became, was colored and conditioned by a multitude of circumstances
that flowed about him as irresistibly as an ocean tide.
Hollister no longer had a philosophy of life in which motives and
actions were tagged and labeled according to their kind. He had lost
his old confidence in certain arbitrary moral dicta which are the
special refuge of those whose intelligence is keen enough to grapple
competently with any material problem but who stand aghast,
apprehensive and uncomprehending, before a spiritual struggle, before
the wavering gusts of human passion.
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