Generally speaking, the important thing is that every man should be in his right place. If he is, some excellence will scarcely ever fail to be developed in him. Thus, for instance, my genius consists in a fancy, so to say, practically applicable; I have nothing to do but to wind it up like a watch, not only to find myself immediately at home in every actual situation, but employing it as a stimulus, to throw myself headlong down any conceivable precipice. If I get hurt in the fall, I can use it again as a restorative, by the unexpected discovery of some wonderful piece of luck or other. Now is this the consequence of an accidental physical organization, or of an acquired power,--acquired perhaps through a hundred preceding generations? Had this spiritual individual whom I call _myself_, any previous existence connected with another form? and does it endure independent, or does it lose itself again in the universal Whole, after the bursting of that bubble which the eternal fermentation of the universe throws up? Is--as many will have it--the history of the world (or what passes in time), as well as of nature (or what passes in space,) predetermined through its whole course, according to the immutable laws of a guiding will? and does it end like a drama in the victory of good over evil?--or does the free power of the spirit fashion its own future, uncertain in all its incidents, and only subject to the conditions necessary to its existence?--'That is the question!' Meantime, thus much appears to me clear;--that, by the adoption of the former hypothesis,--turn it which way we will,--we are all, more or less, mere finely-constructed puppets: it is only according to the second, that we remain free spirits. I will not deny that there is in me an unconquerable, instinctive feeling, like the deepest consciousness of _self_, which impels me to the latter belief. This may possibly be an inspiration of the devil! Yet he does not lead me so far astray, as that I do not, with profound humility and gratitude, ascribe this, our mysterious being, to that great incomprehensible Creator, the object of my highest and deepest love. But forasmuch as our origin is god-like, we must live on, independently, in God. Hear what Angelius Silesius, the pious Catholic, says on this subject. "Soll ich mein letztes End, und ersten Anfang finden, So muss ich mich in Gott und Gott in Mir ergrunden; Und werden das, was Er, ich muss ein Schein im Schein, Ich muss ein Wert im Wort, ein Gott im Gotte seyn."[73]