Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/25

 otherwise, has in it the possibility of a creative or a destructive force. We stop in our work, but we do not know, we can not know, where our work really ends. It may never end, for that matter.

Through the scintellating candor of follies, the mirage of illusions, the unlighted labyrinths of realities, it goes on, with us or without us, perpetuating itself and its fruition. True, we are often lifted by it to cold barren heights, or led into a chamber of horrors. Hence the cowardice that often becomes supreme, the complaisance that often is the harbinger of moral decrepitude.

A diversity of experience, to be sure, enriches life; but its reward, to those who deliberately, self-consciously seek it, seldom measures up with its promise, when our criterion is detached from the higher things of the soul. In spite of which, we continue, after all our realizations or disappointments, to reach for something beyond the realities of experience, in the distances of unknown possibilities. And what were life, indeed, without the horizon of the spirit,