nd the deposed monarchs and the
defeated revolutionists, of whom you read in the newspapers, have
thwarted both their individual and their social will. In brief: Put
not your trust in caprices, either individual or social. On the
positive side, the rule here in question is: In order to find out what
is your true choice, and how you can live without thwarting yourself,
make your _principle_ of life such that whatever fortune besets you,
you can inwardly say: "I have not really failed, for I have acted as I
intended, and also as I still intend to act, and have had my will
whatever the consequences that fortune has brought to me, or however
my momentary mood happens to change, or however this or that social
caprice leads men to love or to despise me." Such is the moral insight
that the first use of your reason, in thus reviewing life, suggests.
Or, as the moral common-sense of the wise has often stated the rule
here in question: So act that, upon any calm review of the sense of
your individual and of your social life, you shall never have ground
to regret the principle of your action, never have ground to say: "By
choosing thus I thwarted my own will."

As you hear these statements, I hope that, reduced to their very
lowest terms: _"So act as never to have reason to regret the principle
of your action,"_ they express a sort of counsel for life which is not
strange to common-sense, even if it has received an abstract
expression in the famous ethical philosophy of Kant. {190} Only, as
you will rightly insist, this counsel is indeed a seemingly hopeless
counsel of perfection when it is addressed to the natural man, who
merely has taken his instincts as he found them developing, and his
social world as he has felt it fascinating or disturbing him, and who
has then stumbled on, more or less prudently and obstinately trying to
find out what it really is that he wants to do in life. Such a man
will cry out: "But how shall I discover a principle of life such that,
if I hold thereto, I shall never, upon any reasonable survey of life,
regret following that principle?"

V

Here at length let life itself answer the question. As I was preparing
these very words, and thinking what new instance to choose, in order
to illustrate afresh the very principle that I have in mind, the
newspaper of the day, side by side with its usual chronicle of
unreason and of disaster, reported the approaching end of a publi