has no real possession or control of those things, but is himself possessed or controlled by them, and so is rendered not stronger but weaker—subject to a master other than himself.
Yet the man who is thus possessed is not conscious of any diminution of his individuality, any reduction of personal power or prowess: he does not discern from it any closing in of that round horizon to which first his spirit was heir. For that by which he is possessed fills him with such a pressure of emotion—its dynamic forces within him are so strong, that he may actually imagine his personality to be thereby not diminished but enlarged, and may (by reason of the violence with which this distemper discharges itself on others) be cheated into the belief that thus he secures for himself a broader base, raising his life to a higher level of consciousness, instead of what actually is the truth, turning it to consumption and waste—not opening his senses to new joys but shutting them in; sharpening them indeed like teeth, but closing them together with springs made not for expansion but for contraction, so that they act like a trap destructive of the very life they would control. And as with individual men, so with nations.
"Would you know a man," said the Greek oracle, "give him power." But that, though sure as a test of others, is no sure means for enabling a man to know himself. Power all down the ages has been the arch-deceiver of
