Strong spirits can stand this disillusionment. They have the power to create new, more workable ideals. They become capable of self-analysis. They learn to be legislators of value and to revise their beliefs for themselves. Their faiths become not refuges, but instruments for meeting and mastering the facts of experience and giving them meaning. The strong are capable of making their lives spiritual adventures in a real world. The "truths" of such persons are not compulsive ideas, they are working hypotheses which they are ready, as occasion may demand, to verify at great personal risk, or to discard when proved false. Such persons sustain themselves in their sense of personal worth less by defense mechanisms than by the effort of will which they can make. As William James said: If the searching of our heart and reins be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, "Yes, I will even have it so!" When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the worthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or, if they cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and fear. The effort required for facing and consenting to such objects is beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary without losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate.... He can _stand_ this Universe. Indeed the path for all who would make of living a reality rather than an imitation leads along what James used to call "the perilous edge." Every personal history that is a history, and not a mere fiction, contains in it something unique, a fraction for which there is no common denominator. It requires just that effort of attention to concrete reality and the fact of self which in the crowd we always seek to escape by diverting attention to congenial abstractions and ready-made universals. We "find ourselves" only as we "get over" one after another of our crowd-compulsions, until finally we are strong enough, as Ibsen would say, "to stand alone."