Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Underhill

Underhill’s line is a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of treating insight and emotion as achievements in themselves. She’s writing out of a Christian mystical tradition where the self isn’t “expressed” so much as trained, and where spiritual maturity is measured less by flashes of understanding than by sustained orientation: what you choose, repeatedly, when nobody is applauding.

“The direction and constancy of the will” is doing the heavy lifting. Direction implies a telos, a chosen end; constancy implies boredom, relapse, dry seasons, and the slow re-choosing that actually forms a life. Underhill demotes “intellect and feeling” not because she’s anti-thinking or anti-emotion, but because she’s suspicious of their volatility and their ego-friendly glamour. Intellect can become a substitute for obedience: you can analyze your way around transformation. Feeling can become a proxy for holiness: you can mistake intensity for truth. Her hierarchy is diagnostic as much as devotional.

The subtext is almost psychological: you are what you keep consenting to. Everything else is weather. In the early 20th century, when Underhill was publishing on mysticism amid war trauma and a culture newly infatuated with psychology and subjective experience, this insistence on will reads like a corrective to spiritual tourism and mood-based faith. It’s also a subtle defense against despair: if the will is the anchor, then absence of consolation doesn’t equal failure. The work is to keep turning the self, deliberately, toward the good.