32 ESSAYS AND LETTERS
from hi& consciousness the questions that confront him^ and the necessity of solving them would be forced upon him. But man finds that there exists a means to drive oiF these questions whenever they present them- selves — and he uses it. As soon as the questions awaiting solution begin to torment him he has re- course to these means, and avoids the disquietude evoked by the troublesome questions. Consciousness ceases to demand their solution, and the unsolved questions remain unsolved till his next period of en- lightenment. But when that period comes, the same thing is repeated, and the man goes on for months, years, or even for hjs whole life, standing before those same moral questions, and not moving a step towards their solution. Yet it is in the solution of moral ques- tions that life's whole movement consists.
What occurs is as If a man who needs to see to the bottom of some muddy water to obtain a precious pearl, but who dislikes entering the water, should stir it up each time it begins to settle and become clear. Many a man continues to stupefy himself all his life long, and remains immovable at the same, once-accepted, obscure, self-contradictory view of life — pressing, as each period of enlightenment approaches, ever at one and the same wall against which he pressed ten or twenty years ago, and which he cannot break through because he intentionally blunts that sharp point of thought which alone could pierce it.
Let each man remember himself as he has been during the years of his drinking or smoking, and let him test the matter in his experience of other people, and every one will see a definite constant line dividing those who are addicted to stupefiers from those who are free from them. The more a man stupefies himself, the more he is morally immovable.
Terrible, as they are described to us, are the conse- quences of opium and hasliish on individuals ; terrible, as we know them, are the consequences of alcohol to
