n nobly done.

Some changes come about in the process: changes not necessarily so much
in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest. I do not mean in our
wish to make a living and to succeed--of course, we all want those
things--but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests,
in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.

One begins with a search for a general point of view. After a time he
finds one, and then for a while he is absorbed in testing it, in trying
to satisfy himself whether it is true. But after many experiments or
investigations, all have come out one way, and his theory is confirmed
and settled in his mind; he knows in advance that the next case will be
but another verification, and the stimulus of anxious curiosity is gone.
He realizes that his branch of knowledge only presents more
illustrations of the universal principle; he sees it all as another case
of the same old ennui, or the same sublime mystery--for it does not
matter what epithets you apply to the whole of things, they are merely
judgments of yourself. At this stage the pleasure is no less, perhaps,
but it is the pure pleasure of doing the work, irrespective of further
aims, and when you reach that stage you reach, as it seems to me, the
triune formula of the joy, the duty and the end of life.

It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God
held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would
say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy
of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless
way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell
of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This
country has expressed in story--I suppose because it has experienced it
in life--a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when
powers conscious of themselves are denied their chance.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. I confess that
altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal.
With all humility, I think "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might," infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love
one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing,
you must have all your will in a focus, you must not be thinking about
yourself, and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor;
you must be