In this he acted according to the dictates of a kind of intuition. It was useless, he felt, to analyse motives; it was impossible to discover how much was disinterestedness, how much unworldliness, how much the pursuit of truth, how much the avoidance of anxious responsibility, how much pure indolence. He was quite ready to believe that a certain amount of the latter came in, though Hugh was not indolent in the ordinary sense of the word. He was incapable of pure idling; but he was also incapable of carrying out prolonged and patient labour, unless he was keenly interested in an object; and the fact that he found the renunciation of ambitions so easy and simple a thing, was a sufficient proof to him that his interest in mundane things was not very vital. But Hugh above all things desired to have no illusions about himself; and he was saved from personal vanity, not so much by humility of nature, as from a deep sense of the utter dependence of all created things on their Creator. He did not look upon his own powers, his own good qualities, as redounding in any way to his credit, but as the gift of God. He never fell into the error of imagining himself to have achieved anything by his own ability or originality, but only as the outcome of a desire implanted in him by God, Who had also furnished him with the requisite perseverance to carry them out. He could not lay his finger on any single quality, and say that he had of his own effort improved it. And, in studying the lives and temperaments of others, he did not think of their achievements as things which they had accomplished; but rather as a sign of the fuller greatness of glory which had been revealed to them. Life thus became to him a following of light; he desired to know his own limitations, not because of the interest of them, but as indicating to him more clearly what he might undertake. It was a curious proof to him of the appropriateness of each man's conditions and environment to his own particular nature, when he reflected that no one whom he had ever known, however unhappy, however faulty, would ever willingly have exchanged identities with any one else. People desired to be rid of definite afflictions, definite faults; they desired and envied particular qualities, particular advantages that others possessed, but he could not imagine that any one in the world would exchange any one else's identity for his own; one would like perhaps to be in another's place, and this was generally accompanied by a feeling that one would be able to make a much better thing of another's sources of happiness and enjoyment, than the person whose prosperity or ability one envied seemed to make. But he could hardly conceive of any extremity of despair so great as to make a human being willing to accept the lot of another in its entirety. Even one's own faults and limitations were dear to one; the whole thing--character, circumstances, relations with others, position--made