of effort? Is there one? Surely life itself has
a logic in it and a law which makes existence
possible; otherwise chaos and madness would
be the only state which would be attainable.
When a man drinks his first cup of pleasure
his soul is filled with the unutterable joy that
comes with a first, a fresh sensation. The drop
of poison that he puts into the second cup, and
which, if he persists in that folly, has to become
doubled and trebled till at last the whole cup
is poison,--that is the ignorant desire for
repetition and intensification; this evidently
means death, according to all analogy. The
child becomes the man; he cannot retain his
childhood and repeat and intensify the pleasures
of childhood except by paying the
inevitable price and becoming an idiot. The
plant strikes its roots into the ground and
throws up green leaves; then it blossoms and
bears fruit. That plant which will only make
roots or leaves, pausing persistently in its development,
is regarded by the gardener as a thing
which is useless and must be cast out.

The man who chooses the way of effort,
and refuses to allow the sleep of indolence to
dull his soul, finds in his pleasures a new and
finer joy each time he tastes them,--a something
subtile and remote which removes them
more and more from the state in which mere