Part 2

If you have a temperament that can accommodate itself to cramping your style while you are thus saving, you are lucky. But, any way, you will be more or less uncomfortable until it presently dawns on you that you have put enough by to give you food and housing for, say, one week ahead. It is both sedative and anti-spasmodic--it makes for calm in the individual and forbearance towards the Tribe--to know that you hold even seven days’ potential independence in reserve--and owed to no man. One is led on to stretch that painfully extorted time to one month if possible; and as one sees that this is possible, the possibilities grow. Bit by bit, one builds up and digs oneself into a base whence one can move in any direction, and fall back upon in any need. The need may be merely to sit still and consider, as did our first ancestors, what manner of animal we are; or it may be to cut loose at a minute’s notice from a situation which has become intolerable or unworthy; but, whatever it may be, it is one’s own need, and the opportunity of meeting it has been made by one’s own self.

After all, yourself is the only person you can by no possibility get away from in this life, and, may be, in another. It is worth a little pains and money to do good to him. For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself _not_ to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things which he has promised himself or his friends to do; but he rarely forgets or forgives when he has promised himself _not_ to do even a little thing. This is because Man has lived with himself as an individual, vastly longer than he has lived with himself under tribal conditions. Consequently, facts about his noble solitary self and his earliest achievements had time to get well fixed in his memory. He knew he was not altogether one with the beasts. His amazing experiences with his first lie had shown him that he was something of a magician, if not a miracle-worker; and his first impulse towards self-denial, for ends not immediately in sight, must have been a revelation of himself to himself as stupendous as a belief in a future life, which it was possibly intended to herald. It is only natural, then, that individuals who first practised this apparently insane and purposeless exercise came later to bulk in the legends of their Tribe as demigods, who went forth and bearded the gods themselves for gifts--for fire, wisdom, or knowledge of the arts.

But one thing that stands outside exaggeration or belittlement--through all changes in shapes of things and the sounds of words--is the bidding, the guidance, that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his steps on that road. That bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that Past when man had grown into his present shape, which Past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a Past immeasurably remoter still, whose Creature, not yet Man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute’s kill, even if he went hungry for a while.

It is not such a far cry from that Creature, howling over his empty stomach in the dark, to the Heir of all the Ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop, to see if they will run to a full meal--as some few here have had to do; and the principle is the same: “At any price that I can pay, let me own myself.”

And the price _is_ worth paying if you keep what you have bought. For the eternal question still is whether the profit of any concession that a man makes to his Tribe, against the Light that is in him, outweighs or justifies his disregard of that Light. A man may apply his independence to what is called worldly advantage, and discover too late that he laboriously has made himself dependent on a mass of external conditions, for the maintenance of which he has sacrificed himself. So he may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success, and go to his grave a castaway.

Some men hold that this risk is worth taking. Others do not. It is to these that I have spoken.

“_Let the council of thy own heart stand, for there is no man more faithful unto thee than it. For a man’s mind is sometime wont to show him more than seven watchmen who sit above in a high tower._”