"I am speaking now," said Tam, "of the comfort of a true philosophy, less of its higher aspect than its comfort to the mind of man. Physically, each man is highest on the globe; intellectually, the philosopher alone dominates the world. To him are only two entities that matter--himself and the Eternal; or, if another, it is his fellow-man, whom serving he serves the ultimate of being. But he is master of the outer world. The mind, indeed, in its first blank outlook on life is terrified by the demoniac force of nature and the swarming misery of man; by the vast totality of things, the cold remoteness of the starry heavens, and the threat of the devouring seas. It is puny in their midst." Gourlay woke up, and the sweat broke on him. Great Heaven, had Tam been through it too! "At that stage," quoth the wise man, "the mind is dispersed in a thousand perceptions and a thousand fears; there is no central greatness in the soul. It is assailed by terrors which men sunk in the material never seem to feel. Phenomena, uninformed by thought, bewilder and depress." "Just like me!" thought Gourlay, and listened with a thrilling interest because it was "just like him." "But the labyrinth," said Tam, with a ring in his voice as of one who knew--"the labyrinth cannot appal the man who has found a clue to its windings. A mind that has attained to thought lives in itself, and the world becomes its slave. Its formerly distracted powers rally home; it is central, possessing, not possessed. The world no longer frightens, being understood. Its sinister features are accidents that will pass away, and they gradually cease to be observed. For real thinkers know the value of a wise indifference. And that is why they are often the most genial men; unworried by the transient, they can smile and wait, sure of their eternal aim. The man to whom the infinite beckons is not to be driven from his mystic quest by the ambush of a temporal fear; there is no fear--it has ceased to exist. That is the comfort of a true philosophy--if a man accepts it not merely mechanically, from another, but feels it in breath and blood and every atom of his being. With a warm surety in his heart, he is undaunted by the outer world. That, gentlemen, is what thought can do for a man." "By Jove," thought Gourlay, "that's what whisky does for me!"