re is thy Ideal: work it
out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is
in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the
stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether
such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic,
be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and
criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here
or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!

"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in
bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over
the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to
the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and
God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest
and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely jumbled
conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep
silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its
everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have
a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World.

"I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World,
or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest
infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the
utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy
hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called
To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work."

CHAPTER X. PAUSE.

Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such
circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdrockh, through the various
successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and
almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself
seems to consider as Conversion. "Blame not the word," says he; "rejoice
rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in
our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World
knew nothing of Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, they had only
some _Choice of Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral
Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of
the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination,