Now the first thing in any investigation is to have some idea of what you
are looking for--to have at least some notion of the general direction in
which to go--just as you would not go up a tree to find fish though you
would for birds' eggs. Well, the general direction in which we all want to
go is that of getting more out of Life than we have ever got out of it--we
want to be more alive in ourselves and to get all sorts of improved
conditions in our environment. However happily any of us may be
circumstanced we can all conceive something still better, or at any rate we
should like to make our present good permanent; and since we shall find as
our studies advance that the prospect of increasing possibilities keeps
opening out more and more widely before us, we may say that what we are in
search of is the secret of getting more out of Life in a continually
progressive degree. This means that what we are looking for is something
personal, and that it is to be obtained by producing conditions which do
not yet exist; in other words it is nothing less than the exercise of a
certain creative power in the sphere of our own particular world. So, then,
what we want is to introduce our own Personal Factor into the realm of
unseen causes. This is a big thing, and if it is possible at all it must be
by some sequence of cause and effect, and this sequence it is our object to
discover. The law of Cause and Effect is one we can never get away from,
but by carefully following it up we may find that it will lead us further
than we had anticipated.

Now, the first thing to observe is that if _we_ can succeed in finding out
such a sequence of cause and effect as the one we are in search of,
somebody else may find out the same creative secret also; and then, by the
hypothesis of the case, we should both be armed with an infallible power,
and if we wanted to employ this power against each other we should be
landed in the "impasse" of a conflict between two powers each of which was