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 pleasure, as in their knowing the universal Mind which is allied with it endlessly reviews its achievements, uniting its vision and its volition in the whole and single Life which is Reality. The life of the individual—be it man or brute—is a portion or fragment of this life mutilated and marred by its isolation and contraction within, a narrow circle. Yet even there it repeats the rhythm and structure of the whole in whose life is its life, momentarily, and transiently, with many a failure and many a fitful compromise synthesizing the two powers which make up its being—its action and its knowledge, and so actualizing itself as a member of the actual universe. So conceiving the universe we understand the relation to one another within the narrower universe of human life, of action and knowledge as each conditioning the other. Yet there the relation must remain partly unintelligible to us because in fact there they never come to unity with one another, but perpetually fall apart in unnatural and disabling severance, the one degrading into empty aspirations, vain desires, tumultuous passions, futile strivings, and the other into idle and barren speculations or self-deluding anticipations of a future which can never be known until by action it has been made present. Only in the elect of mankind and in them rarely do we see—or seem to see—the reconciliation and co-operation of the powers duly actualized. For most men at all times—and for all at most times—the best that can be hoped for is a reasonable compromise. Of the very greatest at their supreme moments can it alone be said, 'they willed what they did, and they did what they willed,' i.e. they acted on knowledge of the situation and saw what by their action they had accomplished.

If this then be the true account of the nature of man