Terence makes the remark that life is like a game at dice, where if the number that turns up is not precisely the one you want, you can still contrive to use it equally:—­in vita est hominum quasi cum ludas tesseris; si illud quod maxime opus est jactu non cadit, illud quod cecidit forte, id arte ut corrigas.[1] Or, to put the matter more shortly, life is a game of cards, when the cards are shuffled and dealt by fate.  But for my present purpose, the most suitable simile would be that of a game of chess, where the plan we determined to follow is conditioned by the play of our rival,—­in life, by the caprice of fate.  We are compelled to modify our tactics, often to such an extent that, as we carry them out, hardly a single feature of the original plan can be recognized.

[Footnote 1:  He seems to have been referring to a game something like backgammon.]

But above and beyond all this, there is another influence that makes itself felt in our lives.  It is a trite saying—­only too frequently true—­that we are often more foolish than we think.  On the other hand, we are often wiser than we fancy ourselves to be.  This, however, is a discovery which only those can make, of whom it is really true; and it takes them a long time to make it.  Our brains are not the wisest part of us.  In the great moments of life, when a man decides upon an important step, his action is directed not so much by any clear knowledge of the right thing to do, as by an inner impulse—­you may almost call it an instinct—­proceeding from the deepest foundations of his being.  If, later on, he attempts to criticise his action by the light of hard and fast ideas of what is right in the abstract—­those unprofitable ideas which are learnt by rote, or, it may be, borrowed from other people; if he begins to apply general rules, the principles which have guided others, to his own case, without sufficiently weighing the maxim that one man’s meat is another’s poison, then he will run great risk of doing himself an injustice.  The result will show where the right course lay.  It is only when a man has reached the happy age of wisdom that he is capable of just judgment in regard either to his own actions or to those of others.

It may be that this impulse or instinct is the unconscious effect of a kind of prophetic dream which is forgotten when we awake—­lending our life a uniformity of tone, a dramatic unity, such as could never result from the unstable moments of consciousness, when we are so easily led into error, so liable to strike a false note.  It is in virtue of some such prophetic dream that a man feels himself called to great achievements in a special sphere, and works in that direction from his youth up out of an inner and secret feeling that that is his true path, just as by a similar instinct the bee is led to build up its cells in the comb.  This is the impulse which Balthazar Gracian calls la gran sinderesis[1]—­the great power of moral discernment:  it is something that a man instinctively feels to be his salvation without which he were lost.