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The thought was a sudden spur, urging him as nothing else could have done, bringing out all that was best and strongest in his nature. In a few hours he had crashed from the pinnacle on which he had soared in the blindness of egoism down into depths of self-realisation that seemed bottomless, and at the darkest moment when his world was lying in pieces under his feet this had come.
This gives him the highest delight, because it reveals to him the deepest harmony that exists between him and his surroundings. It is our desires that limit the scope of our self-realisation, hinder our extension of consciousness, and give rise to sin, which is the innermost barrier that keeps us apart from our God, setting up disunion and the arrogance of exclusiveness.
But as the forces of Nature are all co-operating to keep the child in the path of self-realisation, and as Egeria has allied herself with those forces and is working with them in every possible way, the rewards which the Utopian wins for himself are very many, while the punishments which he inflicts on himself are very few.
If we choose the former, we must cease to halt between two opinions, and must henceforth base our system of education, boldly and confidently, on the conviction that growth is in its essence a movement towards perfection, and therefore that self-realisation is the first and last duty of Man.
One omission, however, I must at once repair. "Mark Twain's" contributions to the work of self-realisation have been in the main retrospective, but nevertheless of the first importance. He is the "sacred poet" of the Mississippi.
The active amusements and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by indulging others; the whole self is never rested save through that unconsciousness of self, which comes through rapt contemplation of Nature or of Art. And suddenly I remembered that some believe that Art does not produce unconsciousness of self, but rather very vivid self-realisation.
If to know him, and to live up to our knowledge of him, is to be truly religious, then the life of self-realisation is, in the truest and deepest sense of the word, a religious life. Or rather it is the only religious life, for in no other way can knowledge of God be won. Let me try to make good this statement.
But we have to submit to this. If we set up our pride on the path of our self-realisation to create divisions and disunion, then it must sooner or later come under the wheels of truth and be ground to dust. No, we are not burdened with some monstrous superiority, unmeaning in its singular abruptness.
The first is that the growth which the life of self-realisation fosters is, in its essence, harmonious and many-sided. The second is that the life of self-realisation is, from first to last, a life of self-expression, and that self-expression and perception are the face and obverse of the same mental effort.
If the life of self-realisation did not provide for the growth of the self in its totality, the self as a living whole, it would not be worthy of its name. One-sided growth, inharmonious growth, growth in which some faculties are hypertrophied and others atrophied, is not self-realisation.
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