and more momentous voyage.  It means only the closing of one chapter of experience and the beginning of another.  The base element in it is the fear which dreads the opening of the door, and the quitting of what is familiar.  And I feel assured of this, that the one universal and inevitable experience, known to us as death, must in reality be a very simple and even a natural affair, and that when we can look back upon it, it will seem to us amazing that we can ever have regarded it as so momentous and appalling a thing.

III

THE DARKEST DOUBT

Now we can make no real advance in the things of the spirit until we have seen what lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot help us to grow, at best it can only teach us to be prudent; it does not of itself destroy the desire to offend—­only shame can do that; if our wish to be different comes merely from our being afraid to transgress, then, if the fear of punishment were to be removed, we should go back with a light heart to our old sins.  We may obey irresponsible power, because we know that it can hurt us if we disobey; but unless we can perceive the reason why this and that is forbidden, we cannot concur with law.  We learn as children that flame has power to hurt us, but we only dread the fire because it can injure us, not because we admire the reason which it has for burning.  So long as we do not sin simply because we know the laws of life which punish sin, we have not learned any hatred of sin; it is only because we hate the punishment more than we love the sin, that we abstain.

Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was better to sin knowingly than ignorantly.  That is a hard saying, but it means that at least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose, some courage in the soul.  We take a risk with our eyes open, and our purpose may perhaps be changed; whereas if we sin ignorantly, we do so out of a mere base instinct, and there is no purpose that may be educated.  Anyone who has ever had the task of teaching boys or young men to write will know how much easier it is to teach those who write volubly and exuberantly, and desire to express themselves, even if they do it with many faults and lapses of taste; taste and method may be corrected, if only the instinct of expression is there.  But the young man who has no impulse to write, who says that he could think of nothing to say, it is impossible to teach him much, because one cannot communicate the desire for expression.

And the same holds good of life.  Those who have strong vital impulses can learn restraint and choice; but the people who have no particular impulses and preferences, who just live out of mere impetus and habit, who plod along, doing in a dispirited way just what they find to do, and lapsing into indolence and indifference the moment that prescribed work ceases, those are the spirits that afford the real problem, because they despise activity, and think energy a mere exhibition of fussy diffuseness.