uld lie;
we feel the environment of our local void; but what finally pops into
that place, reinstated there by the surrounding tensions, is itself
unforeseen, for it was just this that was forgotten. Could we have
invoked the name we should not have needed to do so, having it already
at our disposal. It is in fact a palpable impossibility that any idea
should call itself into being, or that any act or any preference should
be its own ground. The responsibility assumed for these things is not a
determination to conceive them before they are conceived (which is a
contradiction in terms) but an embrace and appropriation of them once
they have appeared. It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our nature
become touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem
hardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the
main current of our being. All invention is tentative, all art
experimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling.
There is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waiting
for the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birth-pangs, before the
wonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and
inexplicably perfect. Even this unaccountable success comes only in rare
and fortunate instances. What is ordinarily produced is so base a
hybrid, so lame and ridiculous a changeling, that we reconcile ourselves
with difficulty to our offspring and blush to be represented by our
fated works.

[Sidenote: We are said to control whatever obeys us.]

The propensity to attribute happy events to our own agency, little as we
understand what we mean by it, and to attribute only untoward results to
external forces, has its ground in the primitive nexus of experience.
What we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes,
bringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has a
general direction, a conscious vital inertia, in harmony with which it
moves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is, they
go forward by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell,
warmed but undisturbed by an environment of which they are wholly
oblivious; and this sort of growth, when there is adequate consciousness
of it, is felt to be both absolutely obvious and absolutely free. The
emotion that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and proud
to call itself a pleasure; it has rather the quality of assurance and
right