he results of our
fickleness, yet without knowing who it is that thwarts us. We love,
and, like Siegfried, forget our former beloved, and perhaps live to
feel the fatal spear-thrust that avenges our treason to our own past.
The deeper tragedies of life largely result from this our narrowness
of view.

But over against this narrowness of our ordinary activities there,
indeed, stand certain moments when we get a wider vision of ourselves,
when we review life, or foresee it with a broad outlook. These are,
indeed, moments of insight. We all know how tragic they often are,
because they show us at a glance how with the left hand we have undone
the {50} right hand's work, how we have loved and forgotten, how we
have sworn fealty to many masters, and have cheated one while we
served another, how absorption in business has made us unworthy of
home, or how we have wantonly sacrificed a friend in order to win a
game, or gained our bit of the world through what, upon review, we
have to call the loss of our souls. Such moments of insight come to us
sometimes when our friends die, and when memory reminds us of our
neglected debts of love or of gratitude to them, or when worldly
defeat reawakens the long-forgotten unworldly aspirations that we
abandoned in order to do what has ended in earning the defeat. These
are, I repeat, often tragic moments. But they enlighten. And they show
us our need. And they arise as naturally as does any other incident of
a reasonable life.

What need do they show? I answer, the need to possess what by mere
nature we never come to possess, namely, the power to "see life
steadily and see it whole," and then to live triumphantly in the light
of this vision. Can a plain man who is no philosopher feel this need?
I answer, Yes, whenever he has his moments of vision; whenever he
feels the longing for the clean, straight, unswerving will, for the
hearty whole life; whenever he sees and regrets his fickleness, just
because it means self-defeat; whenever he seeks to be true to himself.
At such moment his highest aim is the aim that there should be a
highest aim in life, and that {51} this aim should win what it seeks.
He has the longing, however inarticulate, for integrity of spirit and
for success in winning the fruits of integrity.

When the plain man feels what I venture thus to formulate, how will he
express his longing? He will, of course, not use my present formulas.
He will seize upon whatever expressio