istic sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only
intellectually even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself
spiritually. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of
it, a very natural thing to do. Now, the psychological discovery is
merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest
possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the
truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing
our ego to zero.

Humility is the thing which is for ever renewing the earth and the
stars. It is humility, and not duty, which preserves the stars from
wrong, from the unpardonable wrong of casual resignation; it is through
humility that the most ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong. The
curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be
weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the
most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the
hundredth time we call it, in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of
Wordsworth, "the light of common day." We are inclined to increase our
claims. We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to
demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the
primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and
instantaneous. Until we understand that original dark, in which we have
neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike
praise to the splendid sensationalism of things. The terms "pessimism"
and "optimism," like most modern terms, are unmeaning. But if they can
be used in any vague sense as meaning something, we may say that in
this great fact pessimism is the very basis of optimism. The man who
destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man, and to the
humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to
the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the
faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he
realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.

I have not spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility as a
psychological necessity, because it is more commonly insisted on, and
is in itself more obvious. But it is equally clear that humility is a
permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination. It
is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation is
stronger for despising other nations. As a matter