Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/160

124 weankness, what want of consistent courage! Nothing is so much your own its your dreams are! Nothing so much your own work ! Substance, form, duration, actor, spectator, all this you yourself are in these comedies! Yet in these you are afraid and ashamed of yourselves, and even Œdipus, wise Œdipus, derived comfort from the thought that we cannot be blamed for our dreams. Whence I infer that the great majority of mankind must feel conscious of abominable dreams. Otherwise, how much would these nightly fictions have been exploited in the interest of human arrogance! Need I add that wise Œdipus was right, that we are really not responsible for our dreams, no more than for our waking hours, and that the doctrine of the free will has for its father and mother human pride and sense of power? Perhaps I mention this too often, but it at least does not prove it an error. —We speak of the “contest of motives," but imply a contest which is not the contest of motives. That is, in our meditative consciousness the results of divers actions successively come to the front; we imagine ourselves capable of accomplishing them all, and compare these results. We imagine that we have decided upon an action, when we have convinced ourselves that its results will be generally auspicious; before we arrive at this final conclusion we often honestly worry about the great difficulty of guessing the