M THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

the victim of a pitiless, bUnd Life; he may prolong it iinduly by seeking ddu^ve reliefs; but the beginning of a wise and happy lif e dates from the moment when he perceives the truth and orientâtes himself duly towards it :

To realize Freedom, — for this hitherto, for you. tbe universehas roUed ; for this, your hie, possibly yet many lives; for this, death, many deaths; for this, desires, fears, complications, bewilderments, suâerings, hope, regret. — ail falling away at last duly before the Soûl, before You (O laughter I) arising the fuU-grown lover — possessor of the password.^

In his teaching upon this point, Carpenter has the courage of his own expérience, and boldly interprets the world in the light of it. Our knowledge of the way along which he was brought to the culminating expérience of i88l is, as yet, very scanty ; we await those more intimate autobiographical détails which are his own secret ; but, should they be given, they would doubtless disclose — as indeed we are boimd to infer from what hints we hâve — a prolonged period of struggle, outwardly as against the drcumstances into which he was bom and with which he was entangled before the movement to deeper selfawareness began, inwardly as against those physiological and mental processes which represent tradition, heredity, and ail ancestral and racial prédispositions in the individual. Prob- ^bly enough, in the early stages of this Sturm und

STVBM UND DRANG 07

Drang, Caipenter did not understand its meaning or its drift ; when, however, he glimpsed what the truth might be, he bore himself in respect ci it with such fidelity and sincerity that the ulti* mate expérience worked itself out and came through. He himself would perhaps resent the use of tenns hère which imply personal ment ; like others before him " he could do no other/' It is true of ail such eacperiences that they are seeking us out as much and more than we are seeking them ; in our eager quests for lif e, for the Idéal, for God, it is difficult to say which is the huntsman and which the quarry.

Be this as it may« the expérience came through, the Master arrived, and Carpenter knew for himself the joy and peace and power which— if we may recall the figure of the previous ehapter — is assodated with consdousnessin the second unity/ He believed that the secret of ail the previous stress and tension was hereby placed in |iis hands. Then« taking ground upon this one empiric fact, and with a faith comparable with that which l^end — the legend which is often truer than history, — attributes to Newton, he passed to a generalization which has something of the breadth, and may prove to hâve something of the importance also, of the Law of Gravitation itself; he asserted his own expérience as the

^ The reader must bear in mind that the three anities do ûot represent three différent qualities of consdoutneas, bnt the same consdoamess in three différent relations or setting».