thes in which he had entered prison, and was therefore dressed as a
clergyman. No one who looked at him would have seen any difference
between his present appearance and his appearance six months previously;
indeed, as he walked slowly through the dingy crowded lane called Eyre
Street Hill (which he well knew, for he had clerical friends in that
neighbourhood), the months he had passed in prison seemed to drop out of
his life, and so powerfully did association carry him away that, finding
himself in his old dress and in his old surroundings, he felt dragged
back into his old self--as though his six months of prison life had been
a dream from which he was now waking to take things up as he had left
them. This was the effect of unchanged surroundings upon the unchanged
part of him. But there was a changed part, and the effect of unchanged
surroundings upon this was to make everything seem almost as strange as
though he had never had any life but his prison one, and was now born
into a new world.

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the
process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and
unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, in nothing else than this
process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when
we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep,
when we give up the attempt altogether we die. In quiet, uneventful
lives the changes internal and external are so small that there is little
or no strain in the process of fusion and accommodation; in other lives
there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating
power; in others great strain with little accommodating power. A life
will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is
equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and
external changes.

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of
the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is
either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as
external and internal at one and the same time, subject and
object--external and internal--being unified as much as everything else.
This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to
be knocked over by something.

Much the best way out of this difficulty is to go in for separation
between internal and external--subject and object--when we find th