eighbor in a life
given over to material cares, to artificial needs, to the satisfaction
of ambitions, grudges, and whims? The man who gives himself up entirely
to the service of his appetites, makes them grow and multiply so well
that they become stronger than he; and once their slave, he loses his
moral sense, loses his energy, and becomes incapable of discerning and
practicing the good. He has surrendered himself to the inner anarchy of
desire, which in the end gives birth to outer anarchy. In the moral life
we govern ourselves. In the immoral life we are governed by our needs
and passions. Thus little by little, the bases of the moral life shift,
and the law of judgment deviates.

For the man enslaved to numerous and exacting needs, possession is the
supreme good and the source of all other good things. It is true that in
the fierce struggle for possession, we come to hate those who possess,
and to deny the right of property when this right is in the hands of
others and not in our own. But the bitterness of attack against others'
possessions is only a new proof of the extraordinary importance we
attach to possession itself. In the end, people and things come to be
estimated at their selling price, or according to the profit to be drawn
from them. What brings nothing is worth nothing: he who has nothing, is
nothing. Honest poverty risks passing for shame, and lucre, however
filthy, is not greatly put to it to be accounted for merit.

Some one objects: "Then you make wholesale condemnation of progress, and
would lead us back to the good old times--to asceticism perhaps."

Not at all. The desire to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful
and dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not
consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one
of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to
find a remedy for it--namely, the belief that man becomes happier and
better by the increase of outward well-being. Nothing is falser than
this pretended social axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity
without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases
character, is a fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The
worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this
man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes bad worse, and further
embroils social problems.

[A] The author refers to the unparalleled bitterness of