proud effort in
which the baby stands upright for a moment and then relapses to
the more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds within it the
same earnest of future development.

CHAPTER V

SELF-ADJUSTMENT

So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind
all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness
with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest
and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the
psychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act,
you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly
practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of
correspondences with the world of normal men, and hungers for
communion with a spiritual universe. And this thing so foreign to
your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with
it, you recognise as the true Self whose existence you always
took for granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in its
scattered manifestations. "That art thou."

This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorine
mystics, is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at its
summit do we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the
pathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a
sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to
dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there
to make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery which
shall veil the naked truth. True and complete self-knowledge,
indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone. Few can bear to
contemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange and
terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of the
seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and
most drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude towards
himself and all other things. Likely enough, if you really knew
yourself--saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercy
of its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspection
and measured against eternal values; your unacknowledged
self-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates--you would be
compelled to remodel your whole existence, and become for the
first time a practical man.

But you have done what you can in this direction; have at last
discovered your own deeper being, your eternal spark, the agent
of all your contacts with Reality. You have often read a