I was torn by pity for those who were suffering, and after years of war nearly everyone was suffering; but I wanted to be at the front with the Red Cross, and my health would not permit me to go. I could help various war committees, but I could not go to my tortured and beloved France--to be perhaps an added burden, should I break down altogether. The only escape from this conflict was in abstruse studies, studies where pure mind can work. So I seriously took up Analytical Psychology, in which I had been mildly interested since 1915. Some fourteen hours a day for a year I studied, some of the time with a teacher, some of the time alone. I burrowed under the theories of the three great schools, and synthesized them, after my fashion. I had rather an active mind to experiment upon--my own. The “resistances,” so-called, had been broken down by the teacher. One of the things which appealed most to my reason was Jung’s insistence upon the psychological (and therefore practical) value of the irrational. He says: “There is no human foresight nor philosophy which can enable us to give our lives a prescribed direction, except for quite a short distance. Destiny lies before us, perplexing us, and teeming with possibilities, and yet only one of these many possibilities is our own particular right way.... Much can certainly be attained by will-power. But ... our will is a function that is directed by our powers of reflection.... Has it ever been proved, or can it ever be proved, that life and destiny harmonize with our human reason, that is, that they are exclusively rational? On the contrary, we have ground for supposing that they are also irrational, that is to say, that in the last resort they too are based in regions beyond the human reason. The irrationality of the great process is shown by its so-called _accidentalness_.... The rich store of life both is, and is not, determined by law; it is at the same time rational and irrational. Therefore, the reason and the will founded upon it are only valid for a short distance. The further we extend this rationally chosen direction, the surer we may be that we are thereby excluding the irrational possibilities of life, which have, however, just as good a right to be lived. Aye, we may injure ourselves, since we cut off the wealth of accidental eventualities by a too rigid and conscious direction.... The present fearful catastrophic world-war has tremendously upset the most optimistic upholder of rationalism and culture.” Now my rationally chosen “line of life” had been that of writing books of poetry, fiction and essays. But “accidentalness” cut in, and I wrote automatically and published what I had written. That destiny, that second line of life, may also have been, for all we can prove to the contrary, based “in regions beyond the human reason.”