which is given us by our hoarded traditions
and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and
that response are never quite such a single-handed affair as we like to
suppose. Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play their part.
And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal
discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always
back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with
them, to help them,--anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. The
great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and
joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the
successive regenerators of the monastic life, such as St. Bernard and
St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms
which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox,
Wesley, Booth. One and all, they feel that the full robust life of the
Spirit demands some incarnation, some place in history and social
outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradition.

In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human
achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that
such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision
or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision. The
religious man's direct experience of God and his effort to correspond
with it; the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and
hard translation of it; the poet's dream and its difficult expression in
speech; the philosopher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought.
These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach
its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and
withdrawal which they demand. But (2) there are the social and
historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the
past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human
history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it,
the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact
with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from
them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the
present too. Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of