--in our daily
activities, whatever they may be. And this life is possible in social
conditions the most diverse, and with natural gifts the most unequal. It
is not fortune or personal advantage, but our turning them to account,
that constitutes the value of life. Fame adds no more than does length
of days: quality is the thing.

Need we say that one does not rise to this point of view without a
struggle? The spirit of simplicity is not an inherited gift, but the
result of a laborious conquest. Plain living, like high thinking, is
simplification. We know that science is the handful of ultimate
principles gathered out of the tufted mass of facts; but what gropings
to discover them! Centuries of research are often condensed into a
principle that a line may state. Here the moral life presents strong
analogy with the scientific. It, too, begins in a certain confusion,
makes trial of itself, seeks to understand itself, and often mistakes.
But by dint of action, and exacting from himself strict account of his
deeds, man arrives at a better knowledge of life. Its law appears to
him, and the law is this: _Work out your mission._ He who applies
himself to aught else than the realization of this end, loses in living
the _raison d'etre_ of life. The egoist does so, the pleasure-seeker,
the ambitious: he consumes existence as one eating the full corn in the
blade,--he prevents it from bearing its fruit; his life is lost.
Whoever, on the contrary, makes his life serve a good higher than
itself, saves it in giving it. Moral precepts, which to a superficial
view appear arbitrary, and seem made to spoil our zest for life, have
really but one object--to preserve us from the evil of having lived in
vain. That is why they are constantly leading us back into the same
paths; that is why they all have the same meaning: _Do not waste your
life,_ make it bear fruit; learn how to give it, in order that it may
not consume itself! Herein is summed up the experience of humanity, and
this experience, which each man must remake for himself, is more
precious in proportion as it costs more dear. Illumined by its light, he
makes a moral advance more and more sure. Now he has his means of
orientation, his internal norm to which he may lead everything back; and
from the vacillating, confused, and complex being that he was, he
becomes simple. By the ceaseless influence of this same law, which
expands within him, and is day by day verified in fact, his opi