s vistas
explored.

That it is worth while to do this whatever
the hazard may be, all must allow who have
asked the sad question of the nineteenth century,--Is
life worth living? Surely it is sufficient
to spur man to new effort,--the
suspicion that beyond civilization, beyond
mental culture, beyond art and mechanical
perfection, there is a new, another gateway,
admitting to the realities of life.

V

When it seems as if the end was reached,
the goal attained, and that man has no more
to do,--just then, when he appears to have
no choice but between eating and drinking and
living in his comfort as the beasts do in theirs,
and scepticism which is death,--then it is that
in fact, if he will but look, the Golden Gates
are before him. With the culture of the age
within him and assimilated perfectly, so that
he is himself an incarnation of it, then he is fit
to attempt the great step which is absolutely
possible, yet is attempted by so few even of
those who are fitted for it. It is so seldom
attempted, partly because of the profound difficulties
which surround it, but much more
because man does not realize that this is actually
the direction in which pleasure and
satisfaction are to be obtained.

There are certain pleasures which appeal
to each individual; every man knows that in
one layer or another of sensation he finds his
chief delight. Naturally he turns to this systematically
through life, just as the sunflower
turns to the sun and the water-lily leans on the
water. But he struggles throughout with an
awful fact which oppresses him to the soul,--that
no sooner has he obtained his pleasure
than he loses it again and has once more to
go in search of it. More than that; he never
actually reaches it, for it eludes him at the
final moment. This is because he endeavors to
seize that which is untouchable and satisfy
his soul's hunger for sensation by contact with
external objects. How can that which is
external satisfy or even please the inner man,--the
thing which reigns within and has no
eyes for matter, no hands for touch of objects,
no senses with which to apprehend that which
is outside its magic walls? Those charmed
barriers which surround it are limitless, for
it is everywhere; it is to be discovered in all
living things, and no part of the universe can
be conceived of without it, if that universe is
regarded as a coherent whole. And unless that
point is granted at the outset it is useless