tement, apprehension and continually renewed desire. And
affectionate love, from which the passion has faded, means something
less than happiness, for, mingled with its gentle tranquility is a
disturbing regret for the more fiery past. Luxury, according to the
universal experience of those who have had it, has no connection
whatever with happiness. And as for freedom from enforced effort, it
means simply death.

Happiness as it is dreamed of cannot possibly exist save for brief
periods of self-deception which are followed by terrible periods of
reaction. Real, practicable happiness is due primarily not to any kind
of environment, but to an inward state of mind. Real happiness consists
first in acceptance of the fact that discontent is a condition of life,
and, second, in an honest endeavour to adjust conduct to an ideal. Real
happiness is not an affair of the future; it is an affair of the
present. Such as it is, if it cannot be obtained now, it can never be
obtained. Real happiness lives in patience, having comprehended that if
very little is accomplished towards perfection, so a man's existence is
a very little moment in the vast expanse of the universal life, and
having also comprehended that it is the struggle which is vital, and
that the end of the struggle is only another name for death.

* * * * *

"Well," I hear you exclaiming, "if this is all we can look forward to,
if this is all that real, practicable happiness amounts to, is life
worth living?" That is a question which each person has to answer for
himself. If he answers it in the negative, no argument, no persuasion,
no sentimentalisation of the facts of life, will make him alter his
opinion. Most people, however, answer it in the affirmative. Despite all
the drawbacks, despite all the endless disappointments, they decide that
life is worth living. There are two species of phenomena which bring
them to this view. The first may be called the golden moments of life,
which seem somehow in their transient brevity to atone for the dull
exasperation of interminable mediocre hours: moments of triumph in the
struggle, moments of fierce exultant resolve; moments of joy in
nature--moments which defy oblivion in the memory, and which, being
priceless, cannot be too dearly bought.

The second species of compensatory phenomena are all the agreeable
experiences connected with human friendship; the general feeling, under
diverse forms, t