Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/119

Rh if ever, ends in one's naturally overcoming the other. A complexity of environment and chance enters the conflict and imperceptibly turns the tide. Take two youths of almost equal mental potentialities; send one of them to an academic college course and allow the other to browse about, with only indirect guidance, and the first will resolve into a blind acceptance of the past, while the second will be more responsive to experiment and pioneering. Sometimes one or the other will be able to shake off this initial influence, but even then the slow push of different environments and associations can never quite remove this first effect. Every human being contains something which the psychoanalyst or logician cannot utterly explain away. The label that would fit this hidden depth is "sub-subconscious"—it is the unknown part of every being and often rises to dispute those subconscious qualities which his mind has been able to unearth. No general philosophy has ever been devised that could sweep all individuals into its fundamental claims. At best it must always admit the existence of baffling exceptions and insist that they merely represent puzzling and undiscovered variations springing from its general premises. But the greater plausibility is that man possesses a vast and uncharted area which often enters his active life and refuses to be governed by the set rules of this activity. His mind, however, hesitates to recognize any dispute of its potential supremacy and dismisses the mystery by attempting to include its seeming manifestations in a new formula. But eventually the mystery becomes such an obstructing contradiction that his ingenuity is forced to create an even fresher plausibility in opposition—and thus you have the birth of philosophies. In this way man has elevated self-glorification into an easy and all-inclusive explanation of his undercurrents and has swallowed a bitter pill—the renunciation of his altruistic halo—in order to win another shade of self-assured clarity. He has glorified his premise of self-glorification by changing it from a surface and individual trait to one resting in the depths of all human beings and completely ruling their existence. Thus, he assumes the role of a helpless martyr who must dispense with all hopeless efforts at slaying his desire for self-satisfied, rigid rules and his insistence that one trend in expression is indisputably superior to any other. He wins a dominating stagnation and spends the rest of his time in tinkering with the details of his fixed beliefs, so that he may speak with a greater air of authority than the opposite faction