For there stands your old world, wary, wily, parrying easily all your childish blows, and beating you down to your knees, so that you must go back and learn your long apprenticeship. By the time you have learned it, and have become master, behold! your life is inextricably knotted into it. As you learned your apprenticeship, you did as the world did, you learned the tricks in order that you might get your revenge on this world and dominate it as it has tantalizingly held you off and subjugated you. But by the time you have learned, are you not yourself firmly established as a part of the world yourself, so that you dominate nothing. Rather are you now a part of that very flaming rampart against which new youth advances. You cannot help being a part of that very rampart without extinguishing your own existence. So you have never overtaken the given. Actually you have fallen farther and farther behind it. You have not affected the world you live in; you have been molded and shaped by it yourself. Your moral responsibility has been a myth, for you were never really free enough to have any responsibility. While you thought you were making headway, you were really being devoured. And your children are as casually begotten as you were, and born into a world as tight and inelastic as was yours. You have a picture of great things achieved, but Time laughs his ironical laugh and rolls you in the dust. You would perhaps the more easily become free and strong if you could choose your qualities, or regulate the strength of your impulses. But you cannot even do that. Your ancestors have implanted in you impulses which very seriously inhibit you and impede you in your grappling with the world. There is anger which makes you misinterpret people’s attitudes towards you, and makes you resist when you often should accept. There is fear, which makes you misinterpret the unfamiliar and haunts you with its freezing power all through life. There is love, which ties you irrationally and too strongly first to your mother and your father, and then to people who have no real part with you. And there is the swift revulsion into hatred, when the loved one resists or refuses you. These impulses, which are yours just because you are an animal, soon become your masters, and further tie your hands in your response to the bewildering world into which you have come.