erruption? Nay, that the
bearing of the load, the grinding of the work, is useless save to diminish
the total grinding and panting on this earth. Moreover, I maintain
that we have but a narrow conception of life if we confine it to the
functions which are obviously practical, and a narrow conception of
reality if we exclude from it the Past. And not because the Past has
been, has actually existed outside some one, but because it may, and
often does, actually exist within ourselves. The things in our mind,
due to the mind's constitution and its relation with the universe, are,
after all, realities; and realities to count with, as much as the tables
and chairs, and hats and coats, and other things subject to gravitation
outside it. It would seem, indeed, as if the chief outcome of the
spiritualising philosophy which maintains the immaterial and independent
quality of mind had been to make mind, the contents of our consciousness,
ideas, images, and feelings, into something quite separate from this
real material universe, and hence unworthy of practical consideration.
But granted that mind is not a sort of independent and foreign entity,
we must admit that what exists in it has a place in reality, and
requires, like the rest of reality, to be dealt with. But to return to
my thesis: that we require occasionally to live in the Past (and I shall
go on to state that it may be a Past of our own making); Do we not
require to travel in foreign parts which know us not, to sojourn for
our welfare in cities where we can neither elect members nor exercise
professions, but whence we bring back, not merely wider views, but
sounder nerves, tempers more serene and elastic? Nor is this all. We
think poorly of a man or woman who, besides practical cases for self
or others, does not require to come in contact also with the tangible,
breathable, visible, audible universe for its own sake; require to
wander in fields and on moors, to steep in sunshine or be battered by
winds, for the sake of a certain specific emotion of participation
in, of closer union with, the universal. Now the Past--the joys and
sufferings of the men long dead, their efforts, ideals, emotions,
nay, their very sensations and temperaments as registered in words
or expressed in art, are but another side of the universe, of that
universal life, to participate ever deeper in which is the condition of
our strength and serenity, the imperious necessity of our ever giving,
ever t