Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/54

Rh It is, then, not merely our fate that makes our home far off, or the truth a lost truth. It is we ourselves who demand our object as the Beyond; and we are pilgrims and strangers in a world of seemingly foreign facts, not only because the facts, as such, are stubbornly foreign, but also because we insist that ours shall be the wanderer’s portion. The very attitude of any questioner illustrates this truth. To question is to be active, to express an interest; and so it is to seek, as the relative fulfilment of one present purpose, a state of mind which also involves the dissatisfaction and instability of viewing something as still unknown and foreign. Nor can we here say that it is the compulsion of the foreign facts which is the sole awakener of our questions. Even a child’s questions often illustrate the free play of a consciousness that restlessly longs to inquire, and that seems to us deliberately to create its own recognition of mystery, in order that it may have wherewith to concern itself. Still more, however, does the theoretical work of pure science illustrate this nature of the will to inquire. What foreign “compulsion” of facts is solely responsible for the astronomer’s inquiries into the classification of stellar spectra, or for the modern theory of algebraic equations? Yet our whole modern conception of Nature and of Man has been the product of just such a free activity of asking questions.

Facts, then, are never merely Other, or “stubborn,” or “compulsory.” My will is never compelled merely by what is foreign to itself. It always coöperates in its own compulsion. The disappointed lover is such, not