expect from me anything like the consistency with
which the majority of mankind solder and shape their life. Deep
thought seems often, if not always, inconsistent at the first blush.
The intensity and passiveness of the spirit are as natural in their
attraction and repulsion as the elements, whose harmony is only patent
on the surface. Consistency is superficial, narrow, one-sided. I am
both ambitious, therefore, and contented. My ambition is that of the
earth, the ever producing and resuscitating earth, doing the will of
God, combatting the rasure of time; and my contentment is that of the
majestic pines, faring alike in shade and sunshine, in calm and storm,
in winter as in spring. Ambition and Contentment are the night and day
of my life-journey. The day makes room for the fruits of solacement
which the night brings; and the night gives a cup of the cordial of
contentment to make good the promise of day to day.

"Ay, while sweating in the tortuous path, I never cease to cherish the
feeling in which I was nourished; the West for me means ambition, the
East, contentment: my heart is ever in the one, my soul, in the other.
And I care not for the freedom which does not free both; I seek not
the welfare of the one without the other. But unlike my Phoenician
ancestors, the spiritual with me shall not be limited by the natural;
it shall go far above it, beyond or below it, saturating, sustaining,
purifying what in external nature is but a symbol of the invisible.
Nor is my idea of the spiritual developed in opposition to nature, and
in a manner inimical to its laws and claims, as in Judaism and
Christianity.

"The spiritual and natural are so united, so inextricably entwined
around each other, that I can not conceive of them separately,
independently. And both in the abstract sense are purportless and
ineffectual without Consciousness. They are blind, dumb forces,
beautiful, barbaric pageants, careering without aim or design through
the immensities of No-where and No-time, if they are not impregnated
and nourished with Thought, that is to say, with Consciousness,
vitalised and purified. You may impregnate them with philosophy,
nourish them with art; they both emanate from them, and remain as
skidding clouds, as shining mirages, as wandering dust, until they
find their exponent in Man.

"I tell thee then that Man, that is to say Consciousness, vitalised
and purified, in other words Thought--that alone is real and eternal