process of redemption, its various phases are taken up in turn without
haste and without undue attachment; their coming and going have all the
keenness of pleasure, the holiness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art.
The point is to have expressed and discharged all that was latent in us;
and to this perfect relief various temperaments and various traditions
assign different names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty,
or realising one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is
definite and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognise it or not;
therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
specific burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
but also primroses, and it leads to peace.