THE Spirit, in its economic, or, if you prefer, its natural phase, creates life—our immediate or natural life; and the creation of life necessarily involves creating conditions essential to life, not as something distinct therefrom (as economists, in their formulas, distinguish ultimate values from the instruments which produce them) but as something intrinsic in it; since every act, every fulfilment, of life is a point of departure as well as a point of arrival—it is a condition of new life; and every series of acts is a condition, in the same way, for other series of acts. The sum of such series is our capital in life—our habits and capacities, our wealth, possessions, “property”—our “goods,” as they are often called, wherewith, as the philosophers of law say without fully understanding what they say, man asserts his right and his control over Nature.

In such possession life finds its joys and its consolations, along with many inevitable trials and struggles; but possession, born of instability, of progression, of development, of change, is a transitory thing, partaking of instability and itself in process of change. For the Spirit has created as its passing, ephemeral form, that group of vital habits and aptitudes which we call individuality—the individuality being coextensive with that group of aptitudes; but at once it disindividualises the individuality, carrying the individual outside himself, outside the sphere of what he has attained, constraining him to regard all that he has been and is as a past which he must leave behind him to go forward to something else. Forced to abandon this or that acquisition, the individual suffers pain and anguish. Forced to abandon them all at the same time, he dies—which means that he yields his place to other individuals who will carry on the work the Spirit began in him.

Such is the law of the Spirit: to create life and then to go beyond the life it has created; and since this creation of life, this possession of goods and the happiness and joy they bring, may be called “love” (in the broadest and most comprehensive sense of the term), while this transcension of points attained, this breaking away from things acquired, this loss of goods possessed, may be called “pain,” the rhythm of life becomes an alternation of love and pain, so inseparable one from the other that every seed of love we sow ripens to a harvest of sorrow which we shall some day garner.

Now there are people who rebel, or try at least to rebel, against this law of life. And their rebellion expresses itself in one of two opposite ways: either in a refusal to follow life in its changing, or in a refusal to accept and to love the fleeting blessings which life offers. To the first group belong romantic souls like Werther or Jacopo Ortis, people who die with the loss of the persons or things they love. They are our despairers, our lunatics, our suicides. To the second belong the ascetics of every school, from ancient Greek philosophers and the recluses of Christianity down to the many who, quite apart from all religion, strive to live without attachments to persons or to things for fear that these may bring them suffering. But the absurdity of both these efforts is amply witnessed by the utter failure which the first confess, and by the inconsistencies in which the second become involved: for in trying to avoid love for worldly things, they do love them in the end in spite of themselves—but tardily and unsuccessfully; and they are sooner or later brought to the position and to the destiny of rebels of the first kind.

Between these two extremes there is a middle ground which would seem to be more rational on the whole: to avoid direct opposition to life, without however yielding to it in such degree as to fall victim eventually to the caprices of Fortune. The ideal here would be a calm dispassionate aloofness from worldly things that was once supposed to mark the philosopher and the sage. Its outlines may be found in various thinkers, moralists, orators and poets of Graeco-Roman antiquity who passed it on to their followers in the Renaissance—among these, greatest perhaps among these, Montaigne, who reverts to this ideal on numberless occasions and expounds it in not a few admirably animated pages: “Wives, children, and goods must be had, and especially health by him that can get it; but we are not so to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence upon them; we must reserve a back shop wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication shall be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them.” (I, 38.) And yet, who can escape the feeling that there is something “small,” something low and cowardly in such precepts? Who can lay down an essay of Montaigne or of one of his kind without feeling a little ashamed of himself and of humanity? Is it worth while living if we have to keep our fingers on our pulse, be sure the sheets are warm when we get into bed, be careful of every breath of fresh air lest it be the bearer of a fatal cold? Is it worth while loving with a book of hygiene in one hand, ever watchful that we love just enough but not too much, checking dangerous enthusiasms, dispensing with love altogether from time to time as an exercise in abstinence, constantly dreading lest too strong attachments bear their fruit in a too keen sense of loss at some future date?

There is good basis for this sense of shame we feel. In all such doctrines of the “sages” and “philosophers” worry as to the possibility of pain predominates over the nobly human concern to be active, useful, productive in this world; and the ethical ideals which these doctrines inspire or express are not free from strong traces of utilitarianism. To be sure, the sages teach that men should do their duty even unto death, but only because failure to do one’s duty leaves an uneasy conscience not conducive to peace of mind. Their object is to attain that maximum of pleasure and that minimum of pain which are compatible with equanimity.

In reality, the true solution, the noble and the human solution of the problem arising from the inseparableness of love and pain, of life and death, must be an unqualified acceptance of love and of pain—of love as an instrument and inspiration for our work in life, of pain as a necessary travail that marks our passage from the old to the new. The “sages” and the “philosophers” tried to soften the shock of loss by weakening the intensity of our affections for perishable things—a sentimental caution all the more futile since in practice it proves to be unavailing. The goal they were aiming at we can attain by loving with such high and noble purpose that we find in that very nobility the strength to resist loss when it comes to us and the will to rise above it to new enthusiasms. The great things in this world have not been done by “sages” or “philosophers,” by those cautious souls who never put to sea lest they find it rough and stormy, but by people, as we say, with a “sporting instinct,” by souls of energy and enthusiasm who leave the sheltered haven in the very teeth of the gale. The question, therefore, is not one of measuring the quantity of our love for worldly things, but of transforming the quality of such affections.

It is true that before we can arrive at this view of reality, we must have abandoned every notion of the individual as an entity by himself—the so-called monadistic concept of personality, which is a selfish one at bottom and which shows its ultimate consequences in the “immortality” it promises us, so cheap and so vulgar as compared with a true and truly glorious immortality which transcends the individual. Over against the monadistic immortality, which I prefer to call pagan, stands the other, which is more characteristically Christian, if we understand Christianity at all deeply: immortality in God, that is. Once we have overcome the thought of individuality as something existing by itself, we are freed from all philosophical concern about life and death. We have to meet only the anguish of going beyond our anguish, which latter we accept if not with hearts, at least with minds, serene. We have left, in a word, only the practical problem of controlling, mastering, vanquishing, as need arises time after time, the practical form of monadism: our rebellious and our selfish individuality.