Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/26

 and without an eye to see the horizon? What were life without that potentiality of mystery that holds out to us, across the glamors of the mirage and the dusky opacities of reality, when we awaken from the somnambulism of self-consciousness, the nectar of love and assurance and peace.

But we boast nowadays of being free and untramelled; we glory in the right to pursue the light within us, which, under the exigencies of a highly evolutionized society, seldom leads us outside of Self. And we call it the pursuit of happiness. In which forsooth, through the little heart-thrills and heart-aches of experience, we shatter one illusion after another. And we seldom stop to ask ourselves whether such a course makes for a greater freedom and a healthier consciousness. We often forget too that in the cult of the Ego the worship of unconventionality becomes itself a conventionality most rigid and austere. It is, in fact, the conventionality of the elect—the conventionality supreme.

Now, if life were as simple as a