nly life in the world outside us, but
life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities; indeed,
for us in particular who have come up here, who are not under any urgent
necessity to take this line or that, life is apparently pure choice. It
is quite easy to think we are all going to choose the pattern of life we
like best and work it out in our own way.... And, meanwhile, there is no
great hurry....

"I want to begin by saying that choice isn't so easy and so necessary as
it seems. We think we are going to choose presently, and in the end we
may never choose at all. Choice needs perhaps more energy than we think.
The great multitude of older people we can observe in the world outside
there, haven't chosen either in the matter of the world outside, where
they shall go, what they shall do, what part they shall play, or in
the matter of the world within, what they will be and what they are
determined they will never be. They are still in much the same state of
suspended choice as we seem to be in, but in the meanwhile THINGS HAPPEN
TO THEM. And things are happening to us, things will happen to us, while
we still suppose ourselves in the wings waiting to be consulted about
the casting of the piece....

"Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice which we get in the
undergraduate community here, is not altogether illusion; it is more
reality than illusion even if it has not the stable and complete reality
it appears to have. And it is more a reality for us than it was for our
fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few centuries ago.
The world is more confused and multitudinous than ever it was, the
practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less under the pressure
of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable necessities than any
preceding generations. I want to put very clearly how I see the new
world, the present world, the world of novel choice to which our youth
and inexperience faces, and I want to define to you a certain selection
of choices which I am going to call aristocratic, and to which it is our
manifest duty and destiny as the elect and favoured sons of our race to
direct ourselves.

"It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether
we will be, how shall I put it?--the bridegrooms of pleasure or the
bridegrooms of duty. It is infinitely vaster and more subtly moral than
that. There are a thousand good lives possible, of which we may have
one, lives which ar