hard and
achieve a fixed, worthy end by his own unaided efforts, no matter what
stretch of his life it consumed, were to vindicate himself, were to
vindicate his Will-To-Live!

He had arrived at a culminating point in existence. The understanding
of what his life had lacked had come to him at last, and with it a
recognition of that by which it was to be guided in future. Life, to
be true, must involve all the functions of the soul--thought, emotion
and will; must be lived with a healthy fulness. He had not so lived
it. His error had lain in detachment, which had well-nigh brought him
to the verge of destruction. And now it was with him a time of
reconstruction.

He desired to face that full actuality of things from which he had
always shrunk as from a terrifying chaos, wilfully shutting out from
his vision all but its superficial forms and tones. He wished to open
his spirit to the feeling and throb of the living world.

Discipline, self-discipline! On that basis alone could the human soul
develop and attain to Individuality and Freedom.

He seemed to recognise some Force working in him like a Redeemer; he
fancied he saw some strange Necessity in his life, working through all
its dark moments, its action eventually forcing upon him a true
estimation of existence, of his relation to things.

His being should assimilate from the living world all that should
serve to build it up; even as a plant wonderfully drew from the earth
just that which its fibre needed. But for that end he must move
through the living world--not shun it. More and more of its essence
would he take into himself, more and more would he defy the mean, the
ugly, the evil; till at last he should be strong enough to walk
unscathed even through the fire.

That thought which had come to him a short time before about the
meaninglessness of life, and of the perpetual mating that carried it
on, now recurred to him again; but this time he had an accompanying
sense of its utter falsity. He had been wrong in his thought, he told
himself, because to view life in that large way from an apparently
outside point of view was in reality to lose all sight of the meaning
under quest. It was the point of view which was unsuitable, not the
meaning which was absent! The error was the same fatal one of
detachment. If man projected a critical mind, a mere isolated bit of
himself, to which adhered nothing of his essential nature, into a
boundless space and bade it look