Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/400

Rh pose can be an incident in a deathless life which in its wholeness involves the fulfilment of a purpose, and of a purpose which includes the very fragmentary purpose now temporally defeated. That account, in its more complete statement, belongs elsewhere, as the explicit discussion of the problem of evil. It is enough at present to point out what all the strongest of human souls have observed and reported as a fact of experience; namely, that through the endurance and the conquest over its own internal ills the spirit wins its best conscious fulfilment. What if this moment of despair be but the beginning, or the fragment, of your whole life as this winning of the object that you now seek? Our theory maintains that, in fact, this is the case. That the fulfilment of the whole of a purpose may involve the defeat of a part of this very purpose, every experience of the beauty of tragedy, of the glory of courage, of the nobility of endurance, of the triumph over our own selves, empirically illustrates.

For tragedy wins our interest by making us suffer, and yet consent to endure, not the tragic hero's suffering, but our own, for the sake of the spiritual beauty that we thereby learn to contemplate. Courage is glorious, because it involves a conquest over our own conscious shrinking in the presence of danger. Who fears not knows not conscious courage. Endurance is noble, because it includes a voluntary defeat of our own unwillingness to endure. And, in general, every form of more complex rational life means a triumph over ourselves whereby alone we win ourselves. Whoever has not faced problems as problems, mysteries as mysteries, defeats as