is implanted in the instinct of nearly every man like a noxious weed, and it often poisons the lives of men who appear to be perfectly immune from that murderous nostalgia which is the same for all ages and peoples, which tormented equally Byron the Englishman, Leopardi the Italian, the writer of "Ecclesiastes," and Lao-Tse, the great sage of Asia.
This anguish that arises from the dim sense of the precariousness and tragedy of life is common to great and small, to every one who has the courage to look at life with open eyes. And if a time is to come when men will have overcome this anguish and stifled in themselves the consciousness of tragedy and loneliness, they will achieve that victory only by the way of spiritual creation, only by the combined efforts of literature and science.
Besides its envelope of air and light all our earth is surrounded with a sphere of spiritual creativeness, with the multifarious rainbow emanation of our energy, out of which is woven, forged or moulded all that is immortally beautiful; out of which are created the mightiest ideas and the enchanting complexity of our machines, the amazing temples and tunnels that pierce the rock of great mountains, books, pictures, poems, millions of tons of iron flung as bridges across wide rivers, suspended with such miraculous lightness in the air—all the stern and lovely, all the mighty and tender poetry of our life.
By the victory of the mind and will over the elements of nature and the animal in man, striking out ever brighter sparks of hope from the iron wall of the unknown, we men can speak with legitimate joy of the planetary significance of the great efforts of our spirit, most resplendently and powerfully expressed in literary and scientific creation.
The great virtue of literature is that by deepening our consciousness, by widening our perception of life, by giving shape to our feelings, it speaks to us as with a voice saying: All ideals and acts, all the world of the spirit is created out of
