Absolute is to enjoy the human comedy thereby produced. Such theories as art-criticism leave little to be desired. But it is no defence of sin or of pain that it affords opportunities for the artist: nor is it a defence of prejudice and limitation that without them the humorist might be dumb. The absolute limitation of interest, therefore, that may be enjoyed by those who wish to laugh, or practised by those who have some great aim that demands it, is at best a necessary evil. Yet the predominance of some one interest is inevitable in any case. It is the necessary condition many interests are to co-exist in

any sort of proportion.

But secondly, even then absolute co-existence is impossible. A man turns from being artist to being business man; and even though through the alternation of the two lives in him each develops rather differently than it otherwise could, even though he becomes more artistic in his business methods or more business-like in his art, there is a necessary break of continuity when he passes from the market-place to the concert-room. Moreover the rule of common sense is to absorb yourself in what you are doing at the moment: to forget the market when Beethoven is being performed, and not to sell shares absent-mindedly to the melodies of the Leonora overture. The advice is good, but it means that self-realization works out in activities that are successive and largely disconnected. It seems then that we have valued so highly unity of diverse interests in one personality only to find that these diverse interests must split up the person into successive moments.

The problem of self-perfection is thus not merely how to balance together different activities in what we may call relatively the present: but to preserve continuity in

à self whose life extends over a larger period of time. Here, again, the two different ideals of breadth and depth appear. On the one side we shall be recommended to plan for a lifetime, to acquire permanent interests, to avoid as far as may be 'loose ends' and irrelevant episodes. On the other side, preachers as well as voluptuaries may urge absorption in the moment, concentration on the single thing I am doing here and now. It becomes almost the contrast between the classical and the romantic temperaments. The cautious Greek may warn us to love only as though some day we might hate. But against such timidity all that is eager and passionate within us breaks out in angry revolt. Or, again, we might describe it as the antithesis between adventurer and statesman. The statesman refuses to break recklessly with the past, to live careless of the future. The adventurer may have no more courage than the statesman: his characteristic is to tear up easily all that the past records contain, and to open the clean volume of the future without one sigh of regret. Yet at a certain point even the adventurer's temperament refuses to turn away from its old interests. The master

mariners of Mr. Kipling's poem have been wanderers and fighting-men on earth. In heaven they refuse to become anything else, and their first prayer is to be given back the sea. Here, of course, lies the true difficulty of all beliefs in personal immortality. At its roots lie two human wishes, the one for continuity, the other for perfection. Moralists and philosophers may become possessed of the second, but the great mass of humanity, as religious history shows, prefer the first. Thus the imagination catches fire at the idea of a change, sudden and complete, when to the blowing of the trumpets of

heaven this mortal puts on immortality. But weak humanity does not wish to be changed so completely. It wants to enjoy again the love that bereavement has broken, even perhaps to renew fights that were never finished. Consider the intense interest that is shown in the question of personal recognition in the future life.

But it is no other difficulty that is continually baffling us in the mortal life itself. To the primitive mind, for example, the change from youth to maturity was equally the end of one life and the beginning of another.1 At every parting man's heart feels the same truth: and it is with a hypocritical cheerfulness that we talk of rising from our dead selves to higher things.

Yet here too the deeper truth seems to lie with the view of self-realization that makes its chief demand continuity rather than with that which makes it intensity. Or, perhaps, it is better to say as before, the second truth is the correction of the first. Dread of some future pain, some inevitable parting, might make us live less keenly in the present. Now it is cowardice to sacrifice half your life in order to make it longer and more tranquil. This is why, to some minds, the true Epicurean ideal of ȧrapaέía seems even less ennobling than the common perversion of it as absorption in the passion of the moment. And so just as before we agreed that angularity would be better than a lack of all definite outline, so here again it would be better to live in half-connected episodes than to glide smoothly through a world of peace and somnolence. But, on the whole, this is a caution that must only be treated as a caution, it does not alter the truth that continuity of life is necessary to the soundest ideal of personality. This demands that certain interests and affections should

See M. van Gennep's interesting work Les Rites de Passage.

remain permanent; if external events could smash them altogether that would be the greatest proof of the dependence of our moral life on a half hostile environment; that, as a matter of fact, such complete catastrophes come seldom is the chief cause we have for optimism. The ideal requires further a certain recurrent rhythm of activities alike in form though their precise contents may vary. In the normal healthy life there will be in particular a passage to and fro from the direct practical affairs of life to the enjoyments and varied activities of man's leisure; and moralists will be divided between those who, like Carlyle, exhort men to find in their work the fullest fruition of their powers, and those who, like Aristotle, distinguishing the business of the 'practical man' from the wider interests of life say doxoλoúμeða Iva oxoλáśwμev.1 It is difficult to suppose an entire subordination of either side in the ideal life, as I shall try to show later. But clearly a temporary subordination is inevitable: the life composed of the two alternating rhythmically might be compared to a musical movement in sonata form where the two main subjects are seldom worked together, and yet the sections in which first the one and then the other predominates are welded together into a coherent and harmonious whole.

For the moment I pass to the third difficulty in defining or pursuing a programme of self-realization.

The two obstacles within a man's own nature that prevent self-development as the widest unfolding of all his powers are first the narrow span of our interests and capacities, and secondly, their exclusive importance when for the moment they engage us: our best life would be fragmentary in so far as its different activities must be

1 Compare Maeterlinck in Le Temple enseveli.

successive-it would be one-sided because of the stern law of compensation which begrudges universal excellence even to the rarest genius. But greater even than these intrinsic imperfections are the limitations caused by our necessary relation to a community. It is true enough that man's highest life is possible only in the State. But the condition of perfection is also the source of limitation. To fill a position in society, to undertake a task that he alone can carry through, a man must often in the interests of family and nation give up the ideal of wide personal development and devote himself to duties that are none the less narrow and narrowing because they are of high public utility. It is this plain fact that often induces writers who hold most strongly and clearly the ideal of self-development to take an anti-political or even an anti-social view: it is for the same reason that the claim to live one's own life so constantly means the right to disregard some one else's claims. Philosophy, aware of the conflict of ideals, usually claims to reconcile them, to find in service perfect freedom, in the limitations of the public benefactor his highest self-realization. Whether this can really be maintained is the most important issue in any treatment of personality from the political standpoint. The rest of this essay is in effect largely a discussion of this topic from various stand-points.

§3. Action and Contemplation

TO make the discussion more concrete let us consider the two main elements in any full and rounded life. These are admittedly action and contemplation taken in their widest sense. So soon as any ideals of living are conceived two types come to be contrasted which we may follow Aristotle in naming the practical life and