Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/119

happier, but it has kept up the tenor of your consciousness. For this is the nature of progression, that the SOUL GROWS WITH ITS FORTUNE.—"If I am no happier now than in boyhood, it is because I neglect what I have learned, and violate the laws of my being."—This brings us around again to a former position in our treatise: that the advancing growth of the soul must prefer knowledge and variety, pleasure and pain, to any monotonous course whatsoever. Why do you not retain the innocence of childhood? Why does not Adam keep his Eden? Because it is ignorant, dull, and tame. Why is it dull and tame? Because of the expansion of the soul.—"If I chose to obey the laws, I might be happier than when a boy."—Then why do you not do it?—"Because I am a fool, I suppose!"—Precisely so: and if you are less happy in this your present course of life, is it not the pain of it that will soonest drive you out of it, with ample store of worldly knowledge, into a course more steady and wise?—"It would seem so."—Then is not folly the policy of the fool?—So wisdom is the policy of the wise. Why should a man suffer twice, to learn one fact?—Would you defeat this notion, that all is for the best, put your hand in the fire and burn it well: then you will say, "This is all for the best, with a vengeance!"—Truly it is. You will say, you have made a fool of yourself: on the contrary, you were a fool beforehand, and should by this be wiser. It was a lesson that a wise man should not have needed. So of all these aches and pains which come of man's love of excitement, novelty, and general diversion: when he learns so to live in voluntary self-command