smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously and
vindictively that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world;
and even if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, we
yet cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it is
not our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end it
voluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for an
instant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the world, in
fact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We cannot destroy
matter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we cannot generate a
single force, we can only summon it from elsewhere, and concentrate it,
as we concentrate electricity, at a single glowing point. Force seems
as indestructible as matter, and there is no reason to think that life
is destructible either. So that if we are to resign ourselves to any
belief at all, it must be to the belief that "to be, or not to be" is
not a thing which is in our power at all. We may extinguish life, as we
put out a light; but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it.

And we can thus at least practise and exercise ourselves in the belief
that we cannot bring our experiences to an end, however petulantly and
irritably we desire to do so, because it simply is not in our power to
effect it. We talk about the power of the will, but no effort of will
can obliterate the life that we have lived, or add a cubit to our
stature; we cannot abrogate any law of nature, or destroy a single atom
of matter. What it seems that we can do with the will is to make a
certain choice, to select a certain line, to combine existing forces,
to use them within very small limits. We can oblige ourselves to take a
certain course, when every other inclination is reluctant to do it; and
even so the power varies in different people. It is useless then to
depend blindly upon the will, because we may suddenly come to the end
of it, as we may come to the end of our physical forces. But what the
will can do is to try certain experiments, and the one province where
its function seems to be clear, is where it can discover that we have
often a reserve of unsuspected strength, and more courage and power
than we had supposed. We can certainly oppose it to bodily
inclinations, whether they be seductions of sense or temptations of
weariness. And in this one respect the will can give us, if not
serenity, at least a greater serenity than we expect.