what might perhaps be called the outside elements of life. These
once normally faced, cease to exist as impediments, dwindle away,
and finally disappear altogether.

Thus we are enabled to get nearer the kernel, and have a growing
realization of life itself.

Civilization may give a man new freedom, a freedom beyond any power
of description or conception, except to those who achieve it, or it
may so bind him body and soul that in moments when he recognizes his
nervous contractions he would willingly sell his hope of immortality
to be a wild horse or tiger for the rest of his days.

These stones in the way are the result of a perversion of
civilization, and the cause of much contraction and unnecessary
suffering.

There is the physical stone. If the health of the body were attended
to as a matter of course, as its cleanliness is attended to by those
of us who are more civilized, how much easier life might be! Indeed,
the various trippings on, and endeavors to encircle, this physical
stone, raise many phantom stones, and the severity of the fall is
just as great when one trips over a stone that is not there. Don
Quixote was quite exhausted when he had been fighting the windmills.
One recognizes over and over the truth spoken by the little girl
who, when reprimanded by her father for being fretful, said: "It
isn't me, papa, it's that banana."

There is also the over-serious stone; and this, so far from being
stepped over or any effort made to encircle it, is often raised to