; it is only the first and most
necessary of comforts, of restorations, of truces and reprieves in that
battle with death in which an ultimate defeat is too plainly inevitable;
for the pitcher that goes often to the well is at last broken, and a
creature that is forced to resist his inward collapse by adventitious
aids will some day find that these aids have failed him, and that inward
dissolution has become, for some mechanical reason, quite irresistible.
It is therefore not only the lazy or mystical will that chafes at the
need of material supports and deprecates anxieties about the morrow; the
most conventional and passionate mind, when it attains any refinement,
confesses the essential servitude involved in such preoccupations by
concealing or ignoring them as much as may be. We study to eat as if we
were not ravenous, to win as if we were willing to lose, and to treat
personal wants in general as merely compulsory and uninteresting
matters. Why dwell, we say to ourselves, on our stammerings and
failures? The intent is all, and the bungling circumlocutions we may be
driven to should be courteously ignored, like a stammerer's troubles,
when once our meaning has been conveyed.

Even animal passions are, in this way, after-thoughts and expedients,
and although in a brutal age they seem to make up the whole of life,
later it appears that they would be gladly enough outgrown, did the
material situation permit it. Intellectual life returns, in its freedom,
to the attitude proper to primitive will, except that through the new
machinery underlying reason a more stable equilibrium has been
established with external forces, and the freedom originally absolute
has become relative to certain underlying adjustments, adjustments which
may be ignored but cannot be abandoned with impunity. Original action,
as seen in the vegetable, is purely spontaneous. On the animal level
instrumental action is added and chiefly attended to, so that the
creature, without knowing what it lives for, finds attractive tasks and
a sort of glory in the chase, in love, and in labour. In the Life of
Reason this instrumental activity is retained, for it is a necessary
basis for human prosperity and power, but the value of life is again
sought in the supervening free activity which that adjustment to
physical forces, or dominion over them, has made possible on a larger
scale. Every free activity would gladly persist for ever; and if any be
found that invol