y good fortune of his life: a love that was the
complement of the one that was eager within him, a love that was
complete, passionate, exclusive, unalterable. And from that moment it
was as though he had come under the influence of another star, the
beneficent rays of which were blending with his own; vexatious events
grew slowly remoter, fewer, warier of attacking him, tardier in their
approach. They seemed reluctantly to abandon their habit of selecting
him as their victim. He actually saw his _luck turn_. And now that he
has gone back, as it were, into the indifferent and neutral atmosphere
of chance common to most men, he smiles when he remembers the time when
every gesture of his was watched by the invisible enemy, and aroused a
danger.

9

Let us not look to the gods for an explanation of these phenomena.
Until these gods shall have clearly explained themselves, there is
nothing that they can explain for us. And destiny, which is merely the
god of which we know least, has less right than any of the others to
intervene and cry to us, as it does from the depths of its inscrutable
night: "It is I who so willed it!" Nor let us invoke the illimitable
laws of the universe, the intentions of history, the will of the
worlds, the justice of the stars. These powers exist: we submit to
them, as we submit to the might of the sun. But they act without
knowing us; and within the wide circle of their influence a liberty
remains to us still that is probably immense. They have better work on
hand than to be for ever bending over us to lift a blade of grass or
drop a leaf in the little paths of our anthill. Since we ourselves are
here the parties concerned, it is, I imagine, within ourselves that the
key of the mystery shall be found; for it is probable that every
creature carries within him the best solution of the problem that he
presents. Within us, underlying the conscious existence that our
reason and will control, is a profounder existence, one side of which
connects with a past beyond the record of history, the other with a
future that thousands of years cannot exhaust. We may safely conceive
that all the gods lie hidden within it; that those wherewith we have
peopled the earth and the planets will emerge one by one, in order to
give it a name and a form that our imagination may understand. And as
man's vision grows clearer, as he shows less desire for image and
symbol, so will the number of these names, the