fled away from reality
because they accepted this representation. Suddenly they find this their
true home. Now, then, they will sow in the clouds no longer. Reality,
beneath its hard, limited outside, opens to them its divine bosom, and
says, "Ye also are real: sow here."

And now the boards feel thin under Wilhelm's feet. Enough of these.
Enough of masquerading. Enough of make-belief heroics: belief, accepting
limits and conditions, that on them and out of them it may build the
spiritual architectures of life, is heroism. Enough of play-acting: work
is the true play. Moral imagination has found its home and its freedom
in the real; and therewith the first epoch of his life rounds into
completion, passes over its virtue to another, and in his life there is
an ending and a beginning.

In what consists this complete beginning? In this, that he now gets his
eye on himself in a wholly new way. He sees his being as a spiritual
whole, a complete design in the thought of Eternal Nature, which design
he is religiously bound to divine and serve. To serve Creative Reality
even in the regards he bestows upon himself,--in coming to that aim and
action, he, for the first time, beholds his being with a pure eye. "To
say it in a word," he writes to Werner, "the cultivation of my
individual self, here as I am, has, from my youth upward, been
constantly, though dimly, my wish and purpose. The same intention I
still cherish, but the means of realizing it are now grown somewhat
clearer."[A]

"Selfish" is that? It is not the goal, but it is not selfish. Only as
the sense of self is subordinated, only as it not only resigns dominion,
but becomes a loyal steward in the household of the soul, happy in
obedience, can one arrive at real self-culture,--that is, accept his
being at the hands of Formative Nature as a design to be _served_. While
self-feeling holds one in close grip, he can never so much as see his
being in this pure, objective way, any more than he can look back into
his own eyes. The very act of receiving it as the farm which he is to
till,--as a spiritual whole, to which all parts, all partial acts and
interests, and the sense of self among them, are to be subordinated and
made serviceable,--this implies not merely a liberation from egoism, but
much more, namely, utilization of it. Real self-culture consists in the
happy and obedient service of _uses_ in one's own spirit. The uses of
the world, we have said, are enshrined in