ite can return to the infinite only in his thought;
in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be
suppressed altogether, so long as life is conscious and experience
provokes reflection.

Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is
it a contrary force. It is the actuality of feeling, of observation, of
meaning. Spirit has no unmannerly quarrel with its parents, its hosts, or
even its gaolers: they know not what they do. Yet spirit belongs
intrinsically to another sphere, and cannot help wondering at the world,
and suffering in it. The man in whom spirit is awake will continue to
live and act, but with a difference. In so far as he has become pure
spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his
instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally
sincere consent to die and to fail. He will live henceforth in a truer and
more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.
Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so
that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which
they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so
far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no
longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the
final death involved in having been born. He renounces everything
religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as
gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which
action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and
violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts
the end of it more blessed than the beginning.

[11] The following quotations are drawn from _