Yet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out again into the world of being opening out to the Being of God, can understand the tragedy of the modern soul. It is a tragedy rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge. Precisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery, but it may perhaps be said that Joseph Conrad stands at the crossroads where Western man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck out into the unknown. Conrad’s brilliant short story, “The Secret Sharer,” is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation modern man invented for himself. A young sea captain, new to his exalted position as master of a full-rigged ship, finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow of the vessel. Alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his veteran crew, the captain’s heart goes out to the swimmer; unknown to his crew, he hides the fellow aft in his cabin, only to discover that he is harbouring a fugitive. The man is guilty of the unpremeditated murder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel in which he had been chief mate. The captain looks upon the escaped sailor as his double, and he feels in some strange way that he _is_ this other, this criminal. In order to find himself, he must rid himself of his “double.” He permits the fugitive to escape by swimming ashore, by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys his ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land, before bringing her about on the new tack. When the vessel comes about on her new tack, just short of piling up, the captain sees that his strange friend and double has escaped by swimming to the land. A confidence in himself surges through him, and he knows that he is now Master indeed. Thus the captain discovers himself in the Other; but the Other had to be exorcized in order that the Captain, Man, could genuinely become himself. Modern man, mirrored in the modern artist, realizes his destiny by casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul. By an extension, contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches that _all_ others—things, and persons—are set over against the self, threatening its existence: the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed at the heart of the person, menacing it with otherness. All values, all wills, and all being together are but the positive nothingness of the Myself. They are one’s non-being. The philosophy of Sartre (a symptom of a universal malaise), in which the “in itself” is discovered as the negation and the opposite of the “for itself,” presents a world in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an estrangement of man from existence. The alienation of the soul is the condition of its destiny. Only in nausea, anguish, disgust and dread can man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else. We are all Strangers, even to our own consciousness of ourselves.