mankind. And
that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand,
to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself
that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which
together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with
life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so
painfully out of the deadness of matter....

"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"

I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up
the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd
corner of my brain," I said....

Yet---- How did I come to have this odd corner in my brain? What _is_
this lucid stillness?...

Sec. 6

Let me tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods, for there at
least one comes to something with a form that may be drawn and a
substance that is measurable; one ceases to struggle with things
indefinable and the effort to convey by metaphors and imaginary voices
things that are at once bodiless and soundless and lightless and yet
infinitely close and real. And moreover with that mysterious and subtle
change of heart in me there came also a change in the quality and range
of my ideas. I seemed to rise out of a tangle of immediacies and
misconceptions, to see more largely and more freely than I had ever done
before.

I have told how in my muddled and wounded phase I had snatched at the
dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that
spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such
petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on
the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that
our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my
thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations that had
arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not
so much fitting into as forcing into the formulae of English politics; I
recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism, my vague but
elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and
labor, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of
trade and finance and wholesale production, as being something far truer
to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism upon which
men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry between England
and German