“You’ve hit on something, Mills,” he said.  “The man who thinks the least and acts the most is the happy man, the contented man, because he’s nearly always pleased with himself.  If he fails at anything he can usually excuse himself on the grounds of somebody else’s damnfoolishness.  If he succeeds he complacently assumes that he did it out of his own greatness.  Action—­that’s the thing.  The contemplative, analytical mind is the mind that suffers.  Man was a happy animal until he began to indulge in abstract thinking.  And now that the burden of thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to his own disadvantage.”

“I’ll say he does,” Mills agreed.  “But what can he do?  I’ve watched things happen.  I’ve read what some pretty good thinkers say.  It don’t seem to me a man’s got much choice.  He thinks or he don’t think, according to the way he’s made.  When you figure how a man comes to be what he is, why he’s nothing but the product of forces that have been working on all the generations of his kind.  It don’t leave a man much choice about how he thinks or feels.  If he could just grin and say ’It doesn’t matter’, he’d be all right.  But he can’t, unless he’s made that way.  And since he isn’t responsible for the way he’s made, what the hell can he do?”

“You’re on the high road to wisdom when you can look an abstraction like that in the face,” Lawanne laughed.  “What you say is true.  But there’s one item you overlook.  A man is born with, say, certain predispositions.  Once he recognizes and classifies them, he can begin to exercise his will, his individual determination.  If our existence was ordered in advance by destiny, dictated by some all-conscious, omnipotent intelligence, we might as well sit down and fold our hands.  But we still have a chance.  Free will is an exploded theory, in so far as it purposes to explain human action in a general sense.  Men are biologically different.  In some weakness is inherent, in others determination.  The weak man succumbs when he is beset.  The strong man struggles desperately.  The man who consciously grasps and understands his own weaknesses can combat an evil which will destroy a man of lesser perception, lesser will; because the intelligent man will avoid what he can’t master.  He won’t butt his head against a stone wall either intellectually, emotionally, or physically.  If the thing is beyond him and he knows it is beyond him, he will not waste himself in vain effort.  He will adapt himself to what he can’t change.  The man who can’t do that must suffer.  He may even perish.  And to cling to life is the prime law.  That’s why it is a fundamental instinct that makes a man want to run when he can no longer fight.”

Hollister said nothing.  He was always a good listener.  He preferred to hear what other men said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out his own ideas.  Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation.  Mills seldom talked.  It was strange to hear him speak as he did now, to Lawanne.