if
stirred up against you, can easily destroy you. Conform, then, to
their will enough to get power to have your own way." And so far our
ordinary social will gives us more or less consistent counsel. But
beyond such really rather barren advice (the counsel of an inane
worldly prudence), our social experience, as it daily comes to us, has
no single ideal to furnish, no actually universal rules to lay down.
For, as I go about in social relations, sometimes I love my fellows
and sometimes I feel antipathy for them. Sometimes {186} I am full of
pity for their woes and long to help them. Sometimes they are my
rivals; and I then naturally try to crush them. There is thus no one
social tendency that, as it comes to us in the course of our ordinary
social experience, gives us sufficient guidance to tell us how to
escape self-defeat. For my love and pity war with my social greed and
with my rivalries. I am so far left to my chaos.

Thus, then, if I sum up my position, I indeed propose to do what I
choose, in so far as I am able, and in so far as I can find out what
it is that I choose and can avoid thwarting myself by my own choices.
And the art of learning how to choose, and what to choose, and how to
carry out my will, is for me, since I am gregarious, imitative, and
conventionalised, a social art. But, on the other hand, no social art
that I ordinarily learn is sufficient either to teach me my whole
purpose in life, or to make a consistent self of me, or to lead me out
of that chaos of self-thwarting efforts wherein so many men pass their
lives.

IV

You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the
situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual
interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record
of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in
each morning's newspaper {187} may serve to illustrate. These princes
and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and
employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts,
these who seem for the moment to triumph and these who just now appear
to be ground under the opponent's or the oppressor's heel, what arts
of living were they and are they all following? Well, each in his way
appears to have been choosing to have his own will; yet each, being a
social creature, had learned from his fellows all his vain little arts
of life. Each loved some of