Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail
because he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's test
of everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all.
As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery
or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope
begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues,
it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.
It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all these
modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence.
They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was to
admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo.
They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong.
They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to be
strong must despise the strong. They sought to be everything,
to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy
that would drive the stars. But they did not realize the two
great facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the first
and most difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment
a man is something, he is essentially defying everything.
The lower animals, say the men of science, fought their way up
with a blind selfishness.
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