ngs so much pain with it that we can only tell it
from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else,
because our souls see it is good. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act
nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men,
you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen
to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something
lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and
escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and
it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of
sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say--It
would have been better for me if I had never been born."

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+The unscrupulous man acts as he happens to feel like acting.+--Whatever
course of conduct presents itself as pleasant, or profitable, or easy,
he adopts. Anything is good enough for him. He seeks to embody no ideal,
aims consistently at no worthy end, acknowledges no duty, but simply
yields himself a passive instrument for lust, or avarice, or cowardice,
or falsehood to play upon. Refusing to be the servant of virtue he
becomes the slave of vice. Disowning the authority of duty and the
ideal, he becomes the tool of appetite, the football of circumstance.
Unscrupulousness is the form of all the vices of defect, when viewed in
relation to that absence of regard for realization of self, which is
their common characteristic.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+The exclusive regard for self, in abstraction from those objects and
social relationships through which alone the self can be truly realized,
leads to formalism.+--Formalism keeps the law simply for the sake of
keeping it. Conscientiousness, if it is wise and well-balanced,
reverences the duties and requirements of the moral life, because these
duties are the essential conditions of individual and social well-being.
The law is a means to well-being, which is the end. Formalism makes the
law an end in itself; and will even sacrifice well-being to law, when
the two squarely conflict.

+Extreme cases in which moral laws may be suspended.+--The particular
duties, virtues, and laws which society has established and recognized
are the expressions of reason and experience declaring the conditions of
human well-being. As such they deserve our profoundest respect; our
unswerving obedience. Still it is impossible for rules to cover