experiences of other and
still other individuals, without being able thereby even to define
what all these ardent souls were seeking, namely, some genuine home
land of the spirit, some place or experience or insight in which is to
be revealed that for the sake of which all the feelings, the caprices,
the longings, the efforts of individuals are justified--and fulfilled.

Now the best way of defining what it is which our inner experience of
our ideal and of our need shows us is, I think, this: We are indeed,
and so far just as the Buddhists said, naturally the creatures of
transient feelings, of passing caprices, of various and wilful
longings. But, just because of this fact, we can get an insight, as
intimate as it is fragmentary, into one absolutely valuable ideal. I
do not {31} think that the Buddhists best expressed our ideal by the
words "the extinction of desire." It is rather the ideal of triumph
over our unreason. It is the ideal that the reign of caprice ought to
be ended, that the wounds of the spirit ought to be healed. In the
midst of all our caprices, yes, because of our caprices, we learn the
value of one great spiritual ideal, the ideal of spiritual unity and
self-possession. And both our ideal and our need come to consciousness
at once. We need to bring our caprices into some sort of harmony; to
bind up the wounds of what James calls the divided "self"; to change
the wanderings of chance passion into something that shall bring the
home land of the spirit, the united goal of life into sight. And so
much all the great cynics, and the nobler rebels, and the prophets and
the saints and the martyrs and the sages have in common taught us. So
much Socrates and Plato and Marcus Aurelius, and our modern teachers
of the wisdom of life, and, in his noblest words, the Buddha also, and
Jesus, have agreed in proclaiming as the ideal and the need revealed
to us by all that is deepest about our individual experience: We need
to give life sense, to know and to control our own selves, to end the
natural chaos, to bring order and light into our deeds, to make the
warfare of natural passion subordinate to the peace and the power of
the spirit. This is our need. To live thus is our ideal. And because
this need is pressing and this ideal is far off from the natural man,
we need salvation.

{32}

So much, I say, our individual experience can bring before us. This
ideal and this need can become the objects of an insight that