safely the ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and property owners have taken possession of the moralities of the world and shaped them for their own convenience. They have taught the slave virtues of credulity and submission; they have surrounded their teachings with all the terrors of the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the penalties, not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone.

I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral codes now taught in the world are made wholly in this evil way. As a matter of fact they are a queer jumble of the two elements, the slave terrors of the past and the common sense of the present. There is not one moral code in the world today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an entirely different one for the poor, and the rich have had a great deal more to do with shaping the code of the poor than the poor have had to do with shaping the code of the rich. There is one code for governments, and an entirely different one for the victims of governments. There is one code for business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and decent one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for Sunday and another code for the other six days of the week. Most of our idealisms and our sentimental fine phrases we reserve for our Sunday code, while for our every-day code we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or "Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When you attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day moral authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code they bring out for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are impressed by their arguments-until Monday morning, when you attempt to apply this code at the office, and they stare at you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing in your face.

What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will not be a matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will apply to all men, rich as well as poor, and to all seven days of the week. I am not so much suggesting a code, as pointing out to you how you can work out your own code for yourself. I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not because I tell you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested it, precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs of your life-potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular sack of potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is

not yet possible for you to be as sure about everything in your life as you can be about a sack of potatoes; human knowledge has not got that far; but at least you can know what is to be known, and if anything is a matter of uncertainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most important of all-just as the driver of an automobile wants to know if a bridge is not to be depended on.

So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this life, look with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all hard and fast rules, all formulas and dogmas and “general principles." Bear in mind that there are many factors in every case, there are many complications in every human being, there are many sides to every question, Try to keep an open mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning something new every day, and in trying some new experiment. This is the scientific attitude toward life; this is the way of growth and of true success. It is inconvenient, because it involves working your brains, and most people have not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest kind of work there is. But how much better it is to think for yourself, and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to some group of people whose only interest may be to exploit you for their advantage!

CHAPTER IX

THE CHOOSING OF LIFE

(Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)

We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary, degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures, and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.

"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You are driven in your choice by two facts-first, that you have to choose, regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts. Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet and the rising of the sun.

We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.

We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us. This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways, and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the stages on the way to man?

First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans, because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a mountain or an

ocean.

Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade this life, we do so according to its sentience that is to say, the amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the consciousness we detect in

some complex organism like a fish or bird. We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence, and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength. Joyce Kilmer may write:

"Poems are made by men like me,
But only God can make a tree"-

fools

And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:

"It is not growing like a tree

In bulk doth make man better be."

If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant, we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and displays the keenest intelligence.

Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can make as to the path of wisdom-that is, of intelligence!

When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a figure.