. This part of life, however, is only its courageous core; about it
play all sorts of incidental processes, allying themselves to it in more
or less congruous movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with the
central impulse are accordingly lost in its energy and felt to be not so
much peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded, being, like the
stages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously demanded and instantly
justified when they come.

The sphere of the self's power is accordingly, for primitive
consciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well; it is the entire
unoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who has good luck at
dice prides himself upon it, and believes that to have it is his destiny
and desert. If his luck were absolutely constant, he would say he had
the _power_ to throw high; and as the event would, by hypothesis,
sustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that assumption.
A will that never found anything to thwart it would think itself
omnipotent; and as the psychological essence of omniscience is not to
suspect there is anything which you do not know, so the psychological
essence of omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen which
you do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly be made if experience
lent them the least colour; but would even the most comfortable and
innocent assurances of this sort cease to be precarious? Might not any
moment of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake the
dreaming god?

[Sidenote: Utility is a result.]

Utility, like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no
means their ground. All useful things have been discovered as the
Lilliputians discovered roast pig; and the casual feat has furthermore
to be supported by a situation favourable to maintaining the art. The
most useful act will never be repeated unless its secret remains
embodied in structure. Practice and endeavour will not help an artist to
remain long at his best; and many a performance is applauded which
cannot be imitated. To create the requisite structure two preformed
structures are needed: one in the agent, to give him skill and
perseverance, and another in the material, to give it the right
plasticity. Human progress would long ago have reached its goal if every
man who recognised a good could at once appropriate it, and possess
wisdom for ever by virtue of one moment's insight. Insight,
unfortunately, is in itself perfect