a logic in it and a law which makes existence
possible; otherwise chaos and madness would
be the only state which would be attainable.
When a man drinks his first cup of pleasure
his soul is filled with the unutterable joy that
comes with a first, a fresh sensation. The drop
of poison that he puts into the second cup, and
which, if he persists in that folly, has to become
doubled and trebled till at last the whole cup
is poison,--that is the ignorant desire for
repetition and intensification; this evidently
means death, according to all analogy. The
child becomes the man; he cannot retain his
childhood and repeat and intensify the pleasures
of childhood except by paying the
inevitable price and becoming an idiot. The
plant strikes its roots into the ground and
throws up green leaves; then it blossoms and
bears fruit. That plant which will only make
roots or leaves, pausing persistently in its development,
is regarded by the gardener as a thing
which is useless and must be cast out.

The man who chooses the way of effort,
and refuses to allow the sleep of indolence to
dull his soul, finds in his pleasures a new and
finer joy each time he tastes them,--a something
subtile and remote which removes them
more and more from the state in which mere
sensuousness is all; this subtile essence is that
elixir of life which makes man immortal. He
who tastes it and who will not drink unless it
is in the cup finds life enlarge and the world
grow great before his eager eyes. He recognises
the soul within the woman he loves, and
passion becomes peace; he sees within his
thought the finer qualities of spiritual truth,
which is beyond the action of our mental machinery,
and then instead of entering on the
treadmill of intellectualisms he rests on the
broad back of the eagle of intuition and soars
into the fine air where the great poets found
their insight; he sees within his own power of
sensation, of pleasure in fresh air and sunshine,
in food and wine, in motion and rest, the possibilities
of the subtile man, the thing which
dies not either with the body or the brain. The
pleasures of art, of music, of light and loveliness,--within
these forms, which men repeat
till they find only the forms, he sees the glory
of the Gates of Gold, and passes through to
find the new life beyond which intoxicates and
strengthens, as the keen mountain air intoxicates
and strengthens, by its very vigor. But
if he has been pouring, drop by