The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency
to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time
it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors.
Now that we see it for the hundredth time we call it, in the hideous
and blasphemous phrase of Wordsworth, "the light of common day."
We are inclined to increase our claims. We are inclined to
demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to demand a green sun.
Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness.
There all light is lightning, startling and instantaneous.
Until we understand that original dark, in which we have neither
sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike
praise to the splendid sensationalism of things. The terms
"pessimism" and "optimism," like most modern terms, are unmeaning.
But if they can be used in any vague sense as meaning something,
we may say that in this great fact pessimism is the very basis
of optimism. The man who destroys himself creates the universe.
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun;
to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only
realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure
that they are not dead.

I have not spoken of another aspect of the discovery of humility
as a psychological necessity, because it is more commonly insisted on,
and is in itself more obvious. But it is equally clear that humility
is a permanent necessity as a condition of effort and self-examination.
It is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics that a nation
is stronger for despising other nations. As a matter of fact,
the strongest nations are those, like Prussia or Japan, which began
from very mean beginnings, but have not been too proud to sit at