B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the residuum of an act. You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college during many years. There is no other explanation of him. The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly formulated by a great naturalist. Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we see is only our own lives. We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art. But the worst is to come--the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision. How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced. Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards--next year--you will understand. Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, it comes out power.