; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh
to focus it all into one personal force. The essence of worship seemed
to Hugh to be that the thing worshipped should have unity and
individuality. It seemed to him as impossible to worship a thing of
which he himself was a part, as to demand that a cat should adore the
principle of felinity.

The essence of the world, of life, to Hugh lay in the sense of his own
individuality. He was instinctively conscious of his own existence, he
was experimentally conscious of the existence of a complicated world
outside of him. But it was to him rather a depressing than an
ennobling thought, that he was one of a class, fettered by the same
disabilities, the same weaknesses, as millions of similar objects.
Perhaps it was a wholesome humiliation, but it was none the less
humiliating. On the one hand he was conscious of the vast power of
imagination, the power of standing, as it were, side by side with God
upon the rampart of heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created
things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and
miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of
the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter
frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any
one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which
one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and
imagination, could the two thoughts be reconciled?

The best that Hugh could make of the ardent love of life and joy which
inspired him, was the belief that it was implanted in man, that he
might have, for some inscrutable reason, a motive for experiencing, and
for desiring to continue to experience, the strange discipline of the
world. If men did not love life and ease so intensely, at the first
discouragement, at the first touch of pain, they would languidly and
despairingly cease to be. Hugh seemed to discern that men were put
into the world that they might apprehend something that it was worth
their while to apprehend; that for some reason which he had no means of
divining, life could not be a wholly easy or pleasurable thing; but
that in order to inspire men to bear pain and unhappiness, they were
permeated with an intense desire to continue to live, and to regain
some measure of contentment, if that contentment were for a time
forfeited. Of course there were many things which that did not
explain, bu