nions and
habits become transformed.

Once captivated by the beauty and sublimity of the true life, by what is
sacred and pathetic in this strife of humanity for truth, justice, and
brotherly love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradually
everything subordinates itself to this powerful and persistent charm.
The necessary hierarchy of powers is organized within him: the essential
commands, the secondary obeys, and order is born of simplicity. We may
compare this organization of the interior life to that of an army. An
army is strong by its discipline, and its discipline consists in respect
of the inferior for the superior, and the concentration of all its
energies toward a single end: discipline once relaxed, the army suffers.
It will not do to let the corporal command the general. Examine
carefully your life and the lives of others. Whenever something halts
or jars, and complications and disorder follow, it is because the
corporal has issued orders to the general. Where the natural law rules
in the heart, disorder vanishes.

I despair of ever describing simplicity in any worthy fashion. All the
strength of the world and all its beauty, all true joy, everything that
consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark
paths, everything that makes us see across our poor lives a splendid
goal and a boundless future, comes to us from people of simplicity,
those who have made another object of their desires than the passing
satisfaction of selfishness and vanity, and have understood that the art
of living is to know how to give one's life.

III

SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT

It is not alone among the practical manifestations of our life that
there is need of making a clearing: the domain of our ideas is in the
same case. Anarchy reigns in human thought: we walk in the woods,
without compass or sun, lost among the brambles and briars of infinite
detail.

When once man has recognized the fact that he has an aim, and that this
aim is _to be a man_, he organizes his thought accordingly. Every mode
of thinking or judging which does not make him better and stronger, he
rejects as dangerous.

And first of all he flees the too common contrariety of amusing himself
with his thought. Thought is a tool, with its own proper function: it
isn't a toy. Let us take an example. Here is the studio of a painter.
The implements are all in place: everything indicates that this
assemblage of means is arranged with