ws them onward, and strength and
peace are increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is still
too rich for pity to whom renunciation brings these high and enviable
hours.

But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of these
mysteries must walk the dull round of common life like other men, not
warmed as they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered by
intermittent flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of the
diffident is cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed,
it is wont to have faint interest; but before you who have often sought
me out through fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack of
small resources which brings variety and distraction into lonely days.

Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into her
inner courts I may not penetrate, lacking the leisure which her whole
service demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to me
like voyages into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthful
enjoyment of change; they are not long enough to bring that whole
detachment from daily life which, in my case, might prove a perilous
advantage. All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on a
few fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, and
though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the
thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination
her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. For
materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at
the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the
follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law,
exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over
flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert in
isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that does
not alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that the
sum of things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force into
uncharted voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopeless
course, and drift indifferent to the direction or the end.

Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my
active intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a
supreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system
or universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the