Chapter XVII.

Liberation from One's Place.


The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with
that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life.
Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to
place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always
education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the
community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to
the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense
until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always
calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth
do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire
against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by
suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer
growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the
horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never
leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his
own.

It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and
separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by
self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for
an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of
the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance
to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that
individuality and character might be realised through isolation and