Chapter XVI.

Liberation from One's Time.


The law of opposites under which men live is very strikingly brought
out in the endeavour to secure a sound and intelligent adjustment to
one's time,--a relation intimate and vital, and at the same time
deliberately and judicially assumed. To be detached in thought,
feeling, or action, from the age in which one lives, is to cut the
ties that bind the individual to society, and through which he is very
largely nourished and educated. To live deeply and really through
every form of expression and in every relationship is so essential to the
complete unfolding of the personality that he who falls below the full
measure of his capacity for experience and for expression falls below the
full measure of his possible growth. Life is not, as some men of detached
moods or purely critical temper have assumed, a spectacle of which the
secret can be mastered without sharing in the movement; it is rather a
drama, the splendour of whose expression and the depth of whose meaning
are revealed to those alone who share in the action. To stand aside from
the vital movement and study life in a purely critical spirit is to miss
the deeper education which is involved in the vital process, and to
lose the fundamental revelation which is slowly and painfully disclosed
to those whose minds and hearts are open to receive it. No one can
understand love who has not loved and been loved; no one can comprehend
sorrow who has not had the companionship of sorrow. The experiment has
been made in many forms, but no one has yet been nourished by the fruit
of the tree of knowledge who has eaten of that fruit alone. In the art