issues in tragedy and from which history derives its immense interest
and meaning. A world which stopped short of realisation in action
would not only lose the fathomless dramatic interest which inheres in
human life, but it would part with all those moral implications of the
integrity and persistence of the individual soul, its moral quality
and its moral responsibility, which make man something different from
the dust which whirls about him on the highway, or the stone over
which he stumbles. This is precisely the character of those
speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute
the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the
individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of
moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe
is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.

"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by
thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large
sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which
gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and
what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not
in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on
into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets
beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those
philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of
life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide.
Men really live only as they freely express themselves through
thought, emotion, and action. They get at the deepest truth and enter
into the deepest relationships only as they act. Inaction involves
something more than the disease and decay of certain faculties; it
involves the deformity of arrested development, and failure to enter