Therefore if egoism has a firm hold of a man and masters him, whether
it be in the form of joy, or triumph, or lust, or hope, or frantic
grief, or annoyance, or anger, or fear, or suspicion, or passion of
any kind--he is in the devil's clutches and how he got into them does
not matter. What is needful is that he should make haste to get out of
them; and here, again, it does not matter how.
I have described _character_ as _theoretically_ an act of will lying
beyond time, of which life in time, or _character in action_, is the
development. For matters of practical life we all possess the one as
well as the other; for we are constituted of them both. Character
modifies our life more than we think, and it is to a certain extent
true that every man is the architect of his own fortune. No doubt it
seems as if our lot were assigned to us almost entirely from without,
and imparted to us in something of the same way in which a melody
outside us reaches the ear. But on looking back over our past, we see
at once that our life consists of mere variations on one and the same
theme, namely, our character, and that the same fundamental bass
sounds through it all. This is an experience which a man can and must
make in and by himself.
Not only a man's life, but his intellect too, may be possessed of a
clear and definite character, so far as his intellect is applied to
matters of theory.
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