ness, and then the lid is blown off, as the top is blown off a hill to make a new volcano. Or else it all sets into rocky deadness.
Richard felt himself reaching the volcanic pitch. He had as good as reached it. And he realised that the Russians must have reached it during the war: that the Irish had got there: that the Indians in India were approaching the point: that the whole world was gradually working up to the pitch. The whole world. It was as inevitable as the coming of summer. It might be soon—it might be slow. But inevitable it was. Or else the alternative, the dead-rock barrenness.
But why? Why, oh why? Is. human life just opposed to human reason? The Allies did have to win the war. For it would certainly not have been any better letting Germany win. Unless a very great disaster might have shocked men to their deeper senses. But doubtful. Things had to go as they went.
So, it was just Thomas Hardy's Blind Fate? No, said Lovat to himself, no. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt. The Fates lead on the willing man, the unwilling man they drag.
The Fates? What Fates? It takes a willing man to answer. Man is not a creature of circumstance, neither is he the result of cause-and-effect throughout the ages, neither is he a product of evolution, neither is he a living Mind, part of the Universal Mind. Neither is he a complicated make-up of forces and chemicals and organs. Neither is he a term of love. Neither is he the mere instrument of God's will. None of these things.
Man lives according to his own idea of himself. When circumstances begin really to run counter to his idea of himself, he damns circumstances. When the running-counter persists, he damns the nature of things. And when it still persists, he becomes a fatalist. A fatalist or an opportunist—anything of that sort.
Whose fault is it? Fate's? Not at all. It is man's fault for persisting in some fixed idea of himself.
Yet, being an animal saddled with a mental consciousness, which means ideas, man must have some idea of himself. He just must, and those that deny it have got a more fixed idea than anybody.
