have widely expanded. It is an axiom in all progress that the more we
conquer the more easily we conquer. We form a habit of conquering as
insistent as any other habit. Victory becomes, to some degree, a state
of mind. Knowing ourselves superior to the anxieties, troubles, and
worries which obsess us, we _are_ superior. It is a question of attitude
in confronting them. It is more mental than it is material. To be in
harmony with the life-principle and the conquest-principle is to be in
harmony with power; and to be in harmony with power is to be strong as a
matter of course.

The individual is thus at liberty to say: "The force which never failed
before is not likely to fail in my case. The fertility of resource which
circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am--a vertebrate,
breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative
expression of my own--will probably not fall short now that I have
immediate use for it. Of what I get from the past, prehistoric and
historic, perhaps the most subtle distillation is the fact that so far
is the life-principle from balking at need, need is essential to its
activity. Where there is no need it seems to be quiescent; where there
is something to be met, contended with, and overcome, it is furiously
'on the job.' That life-principle is my principle. It is the seed from
which I spring. It is my blood, my breath, my brain. I cannot cut myself
off from it; it cannot cut itself off from me. Having formed the
mastodon to meet one set of needs and the butterfly to meet another, it
will form, something to meet mine, even if something altogether new. The
new--or what seems new to me--is apparently the medium in which it is
most at home. It repeats itself never--not in two rosebuds, not in two
snowflakes. Who am I that I should be overlooked by it, or miss being
made the expression of its infinite energies?"