So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy.

The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system; nothing good can come out of it in practice.
The writer is one of those who believe that truth, however painful, is essentially practical.

That truth when seen must be applied, must be worked out into life, is his cherished idea.

But he, as much as anyone, has felt the usual (alas!) and bitter consequences of determinism; has seen the victim of the thought sit, as it were, with his hands tied; has seen the determinist sink into temporary fatalism, and has seen effort relaxed and ideals growing hourly dim.
He was beginning to suffer in this manner himself when, at Cambridge, he met Arthur; and met in him not only an inspiring acquaintance, an encouraging friend, but a man who was far ahead of him on the same path where he had only ventured to imprint a few trembling footsteps, and then draw back appalled at the sombre prospect.

Arthur was like one further up the pass, who had turned a corner, so to speak, and saw the road plain.
He found a thoroughgoing determinist who was still faithful to the voice of duty, still striving upwards; he found that his theories, far from giving him a sense of gloom and hopelessness, rather bestowed on him a frank expectant habit of soul; a readiness to weigh circumstances, however small, to overlook nothing as trivial or common; and a serene trust in an invisible all-ruling Father ([Greek: pantokrator], as he used to say), who really was ordering the world in the smallest details when He seemed to be ordering it least, and who wished the best for His children--far better than they had insight to wish for themselves, and who thus could be trusted not to be inflicting any useless blow, any meaningless torment, even when things looked blackest and the world most unintelligible.
I do not maintain that Arthur never flagged or swerved from this; the letter on page 164 will show it was far otherwise: but this was his deliberate habit of mind; this was the ideal that he was faithful to, with all allowances for a humanity, and a humanity sorely tried.
He was an ambitious man by nature; I am sure of that: _that_ he conquered.