formance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all
imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevolent,
or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or appeases and
conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention. Thus we meet with
a fundamental philosophy of life in which it is not the satisfaction of
needs, appetites, and desires, but the opposite theory which is thought
to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want; do what you do not want to
do; pursue what is repugnant; in short, invert the relations of pleasure
and pain, and act by your will against their sanctions, so as to seek
pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due measure and limit upon the
rational satisfaction of needs and desires is turned into an absolute
rule of well-being. Within narrower limits the same philosophy
inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation, which produce no
results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded as beneficial or
meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in self-control and
self-denial. It is not to be denied that such a gymnastic has value in
education, especially in the midst of luxury and self-indulgence, if it
is controlled by common sense and limited within reason. Nearly all men,
however, are sure to meet with as much necessity for self-control and
self-denial as is necessary to their training, without arbitrarily
subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that kind.

+674. Luck and welfare. Self-discipline to influence the superior
powers.+ The notion of welfare through acts which upon their face are
against welfare is directly referable to experience of the
impossibility of establishing sure relations between positive efforts
and satisfactions. The lowest civilization is full of sacrifices,
renunciation, self-discipline, etc. It is the effect of the aleatory
element and of the explanation of the same by goblinism (secs. 6, 9).
The acts of renunciation or self-discipline have no rational connection
with the interests which they aim to serve. Those acts can affect
interests only by influencing the ghosts or demons who always interfere
between efforts and results and make luck. Soldiers, fishermen, hunters,
traders, agriculturists, etc., are bidden to practice continence before
undertaking any of their enterprises. Hence arises the notion of a
"state of grace," not the state produced by work in the workday world,
but a state produced by abstinence fro