his fellows and was the rival of others.
Each had his standards of living, standards due to some more or less
accidental and unstable union of all the motives thus barely
suggested. The news of the day tells you how some of these won their
aims, for the moment, while others were thwarted. What I ask you to
note, and what the reason of every man in his more enlightened moments
shows him, is that each of these who at any moment was thwarted,
precisely in so far as he had any will of his own at all, was defeated
not only by his fellows, but by himself. For this special will of his
was some caprice not large enough to meet his own ends. The career,
for instance, of that man who failed in love or in business or in
politics is wrecked. His reputation is lost. Well, it was his will, as
a social being, to aim at just such a career and to value just that
sort of reputation. Had he chosen to be a hermit, or a saint, or a
Stoic, what would just such {188} a career and such a reputation have
been to him? How could he have lost unless he had sought? And his
failure, to what was it due? No doubt to some choice of his own quite
as much as to his rival's skill. He wanted freedom to carry on his own
speculations. He got that freedom and lost his fortune. He wanted to
be free to choose whom and how to love. He had his way and defeated
his own aim. He chose to follow his ambitions. They have led him where
he is.

Such are perfectly reasonable reflections upon the course of ordinary
social conflicts. They suggest to our more considerate moments the
very sort of reflection which, at the outset of the present
discussion, led us to define the religious ideal of salvation. Only
now this type of reflection appears as aiming to lead us to some
practical rule for guiding our active life. For our attention is now
fixed, not on a condition to be called salvation, but on a rule for
doing something in accordance with our own true will. This rule is,
negatively stated, the following: Do _not_ seek, either in your
individual self as you are or in your social experience as it comes,
for the whole truth either about what your own will is or about how
you can get your aims. For if you confine yourself to such sources of
moral insight, you will go on thwarting yourself quite as genuinely,
even if by good luck, not quite as scandalously, as the bankrupt
speculators and the strikers and the outcast oppressors, and the
politicians {189} and the murderers, a