n the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art
of living, as in all the arts which illustrate and enrich living, the
amateur and the dilettante have no real position; they never attain
to that mastery of knowledge or of execution which alone give reality
to a man's life or work. Mastery in any art comes to those only who
give themselves without reservation or stint to their task; mastery
in the supreme art of living is within reach of those only who live
completely in every faculty and relation.

To stand in the closest and most vital relation to one's time is,
therefore, the first condition of comprehending one's age and getting
from it what it has to give. But while a man must be in and with his
time in the most vital sense, he must not be wholly of it. To get the
vital enrichment which flows from identification with one's age, and
at the same time to get the detachment which enables one to see his
time in true relation to all time, is one of the probl