s
involuntary reactions, one's pride and jealousy, all that one might call
the dramatic side of one's life, may be in conflict with the definitely
seen rightnesses of one's higher use...."

The writing changed at this point.

"All this seems to me at once as old as the hills and too new to be
true. This is like the conflict of the Superior Man of Confucius to
control himself, it is like the Christian battle of the spirit with the
flesh, it savours of that eternal wrangle between the general and the
particular which is metaphysics, it was for this aristocratic self, for
righteousness' sake, that men have hungered and thirsted, and on this
point men have left father and mother and child and wife and followed
after salvation. This world-wide, ever-returning antagonism has filled
the world in every age with hermits and lamas, recluses and teachers,
devoted and segregated lives. It is a perpetual effort to get above the
simplicity of barbarism. Whenever men have emerged from the primitive
barbarism of the farm and the tribe, then straightway there has emerged
this conception of a specialized life a little lifted off the earth;
often, for the sake of freedom, celibate, usually disciplined, sometimes
directed, having a generalized aim, beyond personal successes and bodily
desires. So it is that the philosopher, the scientifically concentrated
man, has appeared, often, I admit, quite ridiculously at first, setting
out upon the long journey that will end only when the philosopher is
king....

"At first I called my Second Limitation, Sex. But from the outset I
meant more than mere sexual desire, lust and lustful imaginings, more
than personal reactions to beauty and spirited living, more even than
what is called love. On the one hand I had in mind many appetites that
are not sexual yet turn to bodily pleasure, and on the other there are
elements of pride arising out of sex and passing into other regions,
all the elements of rivalry for example, that have strained my first
definition to the utmost. And I see now that this Second Limitation as I
first imagined it spreads out without any definite boundary, to include
one's rivalries with old schoolfellows, for example, one's generosities
to beggars and dependents, one's desire to avenge an injured friend,
one's point of honour, one's regard for the good opinion of an aunt and
one's concern for the health of a pet cat. All these things may enrich,
but they may also impede and limi