The Law is for All

Chapter II A Verses 70- 72 143 Never up, never in!” The application is universal. Far from me be it to deny that excess is too often disastrous. The athlete who dies in his early prime is the skeleton at every Boat Supper. But in such cases the excess is almost always due to the desire to excel other men, instead of referring the matter to the only competent judge, the true Will of the body. I myself used to “go all out” on moun­ tains; I hold more World’s Records of various kinds than I can reckon—for pace, skill, daring, and endurance. But I never wor­ ried about whether other people could beat me. For this reason my excesses, instead of causing damage to health and danger to life, turned me from a delicate boy, too frail for football, doomed by my doctors to die in my teens, into a robust ruffian who throve on every kind of hardship and exposure. On the contrary, every department of life in which, from dis­ taste or laziness, I did not “exceed”, is constantly crippling me in one way or another—and I recognize with savage remorse that the weakness which I could have corrected so easily in my twen­ ties is in my forties an incurably chronic complaint. 72. Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine—and doubt it not, an if thou art ever joyous!—death is the crown of all. Commentary: This striving is to be strenuous. We are not to set our lives at a pin’s fee. “Unhand me, gentlemen.... I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!”1 Death is the End that crowns the Work. 1 [Hamlet i, 4.] Evolution works by variation. When an animal develops one part of itself beyond the others, it infringes the norm of its type. At first this effort is made at the expense of other efforts, and it seems as if, the general balance being upset, the Nature were in danger. (It must obviously appear so to the casual observer—who probably reproaches and persecutes the experimenter.) But when this variation is intended to meet some new, or even foreseen, change in environment, and is paid for by some surplus part, or some part now superfluous, although once useful to meet a qual­ ity of the environment which no longer menaces the individual, the adaptation is biologically profitable.