its place in this ideal; every irksome job, every wearisome
responsibility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way
annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery,
bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambitions and
aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the
spirit to grasp what as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of
the man to fit the job rather than the shaping of the job to fit the
man, which is, I imagine, the source of most of the discontent on earth,
has its place here, as well as the hundreds of things we shouldn't do if
we were not compelled to. Whatever summons us to conflict summons us to
life, and life, as we learn from a glance at the past, never shirks the
challenge.

It never shirks the challenge, and, what is more, it never fails to find
the expedient by which the new demand is to be satisfied. To the
conquest of fear that plank must be foundational. As far as we can learn
there never was an emergency yet which the life-principle was not
equipped to meet. When all existing methods had been used up it invented
new ones; when seemingly at the end of its new resources it was only
beginning to go on again.



X


The deduction I make is this, that a law which was operative on such a
scale before man had come into the world at all must be still more
effective now that we can help to carry it out. The life-principle is
not less ingenious than it ever was, while the conquest-principle must