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people who cannot discriminate. This is the ultimate test of
sensitiveness; and sensitiveness alone separates us and unites us.

We all create, or have created for us by the fatality of our
temperament, a unique and individual universe. It is only by
bringing into light the most secret and subtle elements of this
self-contained system of things that we can find out where our lonely
orbits touch.

Like all primordial aspects of life the situation is double-edged and
contradictory.

The further we emphasise and drag forth, out of their reluctant
twilight, the lurking attractions and antipathies of our destiny, the
nearer, at once, and the more obscure, we find ourselves growing, to
those about us.

And the wisdom of the difficult game we are called upon to play,
lies in just this very antinomy,--in just this very contradiction--that
to make ourselves better understood we have to emphasise our
differences, and to touch the universe of our friend we have to travel
away from him, on a curve of free sky.

The cultivation of what in us is lonely and unique creates of
necessity a perpetual series of shocks and jars. The unruffled nerves
of the lower animals become enviable, and we fall into moods of
malicious reaction and vindictive recoil. And yet,--for Nature makes
use even of what is named evil to pursue her cherished ends--the
very betrayal of our outraged feelings produces no unpleasant effect
upon the minds of others. They know us better so, and the sense of
power in them is delicately gratified by the spectacle of our
weakness; even as ours is by the spectacle of theirs.

The art of discrimination is the art of letting oneself go, more and
more wilfully; letting oneself go along the lines of one's unique
predilections; letting oneself go with the resolute push of the
inquisitive intellect; the intellect whose role it is to register--with
just all the preciseness it may--every one of the little discoveries we
make on the long road.

The difference between interesting and uninteresting critics of life,
is just the difference between those who have refused to let
themselves be thus carried away, on the stream of their fatality, and
those who have not refused. That is why in all the really arresting
writers and artists there is something equivocal and disturbing when
we come to know them.

Genius itself, in the last analysis, is not so much the possession of
unusual vision--some of the most powerful geniuses h