really increased by toil which is not the outcome of personal appreciation. Unless one is obsessed by the idea of pure quantity, he must recognize that a great deal of even conscientious work is done which the world would be quite as well off without. Quality, on the other hand, almost invariably comes from the man who is interested in his job.
And there is a further qualification which may help to quiet moralistic scruples, the distinction between our career in the large, in so far as we can aim at it with conscious deliberation and foresight, and the emergencies which, in a world like the present one, constantly intrude themselves upon us. Now these last present themselves not seldom to our natural moral feeling as exceptions to the general principle of 'living one's own life.' In so far as a man can plan his life for himself,—and more and more this is coming to represent one of the necessary requirements of a tolerable social order,—then it ought not in the normal mind to give rise to the least sense of unworthiness when he deliberately seeks to know his own wants and interests, and to shape his career so as to the fullest extent possible to give play to these, and evoke thereby the greatest satisfaction open to his nature. But it is only within limits that we can thus determine our field of conduct. Life presents many hard-and-fast choices. Demands are made quite independently of any will of ours; responsibilities are put upon us by circumstances beyond our control. Now when such occasions arise, it is often, to be sure, still possible to evade the responsibilities that would lead us into uncongenial fields, and to stick to the pleasanter paths to which our natural likings point us; and it is not necessary to pronounce upon the nature of what in such a dilemma it is our duty to choose. This is indeed indeterminable, except in view of the special circumstances of the particular case. Often a wrong perspective makes such external claims seem far more important than they really are, and they ought not to be allowed to interfere with our fixed plans, and to dissipate our lives. But there will be little question that while we do not call upon a man in the abstract to sacrifice to impersonal demands the interests which appeal to him individually, we do normally tend
