Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/164

150 walks through the garden of his spirit in the cool of the evening. I must not linger too long over this idea. But it is a transforming idea. It allows no act of life to be commonplace. It makes every act of life a moral act, and if it be touched with emotion it makes every act of life a religious act. It is a thought to awaken enthusiasm, for it seems to me in a very real sense to transfigure life.

All conduct, all action, is, then, either good or bad; not good or bad abstractly and absolutely, but good or bad with respect to some tangible end. But this relativity must always be kept in mind. A coat is good in winter if it keeps us warm; it is good in summer if it keeps us cool. A shot is a good one if it goes straight to the mark. A machine is a good one if it does the required work. The criterion of the thing seems to lie in this, whether it is well or ill adapted to the end in view. It is precisely the same with conduct. Evolved conduct is marked by a nice adjustment of means to ends.

Now, a thoroughgoing analysis of every scheme of life shows that happiness, whether it be called such with all frankness and sincerity, or whether it be called blessedness, or virtue, or perfection, is in reality the final end. The immediate end must be the means to happiness, and morality, the art of right living, must consist in the realization of these means in the fullest possible measure. But bear in mind that happiness is not self-existent, a bright light shining in the darkness of the unfelt. It is a state of individual consciousness, which results from the gratification of individual desires. You remember what Omar Khayyám says:

 I sent my Soul through, the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell; And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered, 'I myself am Heaven and Hell.' Heaven but the Vision of fulfilled desire, And Hell the shadow of a Soul on fire."

The moral life consists in realizing the utmost attainable measure of happiness, and this, not alone for one's self, but quite as ardently for one's children and one's fellows. It is not a selfish scheme of life, not happiness for one's self and misery for others, but happiness as a universal end. It means fullness of living, the entertaining of manifold desires and interests, and their most complete and rational gratification. It is a divine abandon, rather than a narrow asceticism; extravagance, rather than parsimony. Plato, you may remember, speaks of the world as the product of the divine ungrudgingness. What an unparalleled description, and how pleasant to repeat to one's self in the midst of a commercial age! The human life which most nearly approaches the divine is steeped in