And now the boards feel thin under Wilhelm's feet. Enough of these. Enough of masquerading. Enough of make-belief heroics: belief, accepting limits and conditions, that on them and out of them it may build the spiritual architectures of life, is heroism. Enough of play-acting: work is the true play. Moral imagination has found its home and its freedom in the real; and therewith the first epoch of his life rounds into completion, passes over its virtue to another, and in his life there is an ending and a beginning. In what consists this complete beginning? In this, that he now gets his eye on himself in a wholly new way. He sees his being as a spiritual whole, a complete design in the thought of Eternal Nature, which design he is religiously bound to divine and serve. To serve Creative Reality even in the regards he bestows upon himself,--in coming to that aim and action, he, for the first time, beholds his being with a pure eye. "To say it in a word," he writes to Werner, "the cultivation of my individual self, here as I am, has, from my youth upward, been constantly, though dimly, my wish and purpose. The same intention I still cherish, but the means of realizing it are now grown somewhat clearer."[A] "Selfish" is that? It is not the goal, but it is not selfish. Only as the sense of self is subordinated, only as it not only resigns dominion, but becomes a loyal steward in the household of the soul, happy in obedience, can one arrive at real self-culture,--that is, accept his being at the hands of Formative Nature as a design to be _served_. While self-feeling holds one in close grip, he can never so much as see his being in this pure, objective way, any more than he can look back into his own eyes. The very act of receiving it as the farm which he is to till,--as a spiritual whole, to which all parts, all partial acts and interests, and the sense of self among them, are to be subordinated and made serviceable,--this implies not merely a liberation from egoism, but much more, namely, utilization of it. Real self-culture consists in the happy and obedient service of _uses_ in one's own spirit. The uses of the world, we have said, are enshrined in the spirit of man; when one can freely and faithfully serve these, his life as a whole human being has begun. Self-culture, in the Goethean sense, is, then, a much nobler and more religious affair than the popular notion makes it. But even this, I repeat, is, in Goethe's view, simply the complete beginning. True, the usual notion is different. Some, that suppose themselves his followers, rest finally in self-culture; many, who think this the goal of Goethe's own life, inveigh against him accordingly. Did men, however, always wait to understand ere condemning, much virtuous indignation would never come to use. Precious is virtuous indignation; nevertheless, here there is for it no suitable occasion. Wilhelm goes on toward spiritual ripeness; we follow his advance.