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We flit forward to Elfride. Woman's ruling passion to fascinate and influence those more powerful than she though operant in Elfride, was decidedly purposeless. She had wanted her friend Knight's good opinion from the first: how much more than that elementary ingredient of friendship she now desired, her fears would hardly allow her to think.
Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has human interest as being operant in a soul like our own.
It is produced by one who is able to include in his dramatic programme the whole sweep of its eventualities, the whole range of its particulars, because he has made himself acquainted with the forces, he has ascended, by scientifically inclusive definition, to the 'powers' that are to be 'operant' in it; and he who has that 'charactery' of nature, may indeed 'lay the future open. We talk of prophecy; but there is nothing in literature to compare at all with this great specimen of the prophecy of Induction.
The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that of natural law, by experience; in the social world the relations of men to one another and in the more important region of our own nature we learn the issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world; in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the laws operant in our being, as well as those of the physical world.
A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct are not unknown. The upshot was that the cure became so permanent as to be itself a new disease.
The greatest Athenians were certainly not religious in Professor Flint's sense of the word, and the grand old Roman patriots had scarcely a scintillation of such a religious faith as he speaks of. Their religion was simply patriotism, but it was quite as operant and effective as Christian piety has ever been.
I know not whence came the stones that fashioned it, but among them I saw the prototypes of all the gems I had loved on earth far more beautiful than they, for these were living stones such in which I saw, not the intent alone, but the intender too; not the idea alone, but the imbodier present, the operant outsender: nothing in this kingdom was dead; nothing was mere; nothing only a thing.
Why? Because from the same motive they had been co- operant to the same great end.
It is true that whoever would cross the threshold of any world, must leave fear behind him; but, for myself, I could claim no part in its absence. No conscious courage was operant in me; simply, I was not afraid. I neither knew why I was not afraid, nor wherefore I might have been afraid. I feared not even fear which of all dangers is the most dangerous.
If these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality whose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout it and called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which, as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant.
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