EXPERIENCE ELICITS THE SOUL

to escape any particular kind of expérience is obviously wrong ; for the " seeldng to escape" is itself expérience, and ail we do is to substitute a négative for a positive. To rebel against an expérience, to fight it, to keep it at arm's length, is not only exhausting, but is a refusai of intimate knowledge, and leaves the expérience still to corne, like the lawyer's man who has not delivered the writ ; it prolongs the period of tutelage. The instinct of the créative Ufe — as seen, for example, in the Ârtist — ^is to enter into ail expérience, and, under self-mastery, under the magie of what MaeterUnck has spoken of as the legend written on the threshold, to welcome ail expérience.

We answer our second question, therefore, by saying that what is reaUy happening in expérience is that some potentiaUty of the soûl, some latent power, is being realized. It would seem, then, that, if the soûl* s true Identity is the Great Self of ail things, and if its destiny is the reaUzation of this Selfhood in fulness, then every kind of expérience may be ' necessary .

It is our custom to divide expériences, in a gênerai way, into good and bad, and a traditional pedagogy teaches us to avoid the one and seek the other ; but, if the crux of any expérience is in the soûl' s reaction to it, there will be great diflBiculty in definitely apportioning every expérience to one or other of thèse two classes. In a poem entitled " Nothing Less than Ail," * Car-