in his exposition of the Peripatetic philosophy[2]:  happiness, he says, means vigorous and successful activity in all your undertakings; and he explains that by vigor [Greek:  aretae] he means mastery in any thing, whatever it be.  Now, the original purpose of those forces with which nature has endowed man is to enable him to struggle against the difficulties which beset him on all sides.  But if this struggle comes to an end, his unemployed forces become a burden to him; and he has to set to work and play with them,—­to use them, I mean, for no purpose at all, beyond avoiding the other source of human suffering, boredom, to which he is at once exposed.  It is the upper classes, people of wealth, who are the greatest victims of boredom.  Lucretius long ago described their miserable state, and the truth of his description may be still recognized to-day, in the life of every great capital—­where the rich man is seldom in his own halls, because it bores him to be there, and still he returns thither, because he is no better off outside;—­or else he is away in post-haste to his house in the country, as if it were on fire; and he is no sooner arrived there, than he is bored again, and seeks to forget everything in sleep, or else hurries back to town once more.

[Footnote 1:  i. 7 and vii. 13, 14.]

[Footnote 2:  Ecl. eth. ii., ch 7.]

Exit saepe foras magnis ex aedibus ille, Esse domi quem pertaesum est, subitoque reventat, Quippe foris nihilo melius qui sentiat esse.  Currit, agens mannos, ad villam precipitanter, Auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans:  Oscitat extemplo, tetigit quum limina villae; Aut abit in somnum gravis, atque oblivia quaerit; Aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit.[1]

[Footnote 1:  III 1073.]

In their youth, such people must have had a superfluity of muscular and vital energy,—­powers which, unlike those of the mind, cannot maintain their full degree of vigor very long; and in later years they either have no mental powers at all, or cannot develop any for want of employment which would bring them into play; so that they are in a wretched plight. Will, however, they still possess, for this is the only power that is inexhaustible; and they try to stimulate their will by passionate excitement, such as games of chance for high stakes—­undoubtedly a most degrading form of vice.  And one may say generally that if a man finds himself with nothing to do, he is sure to choose some amusement suited to the kind of power in which he excels,—­bowls, it may be, or chess; hunting or painting; horse-racing or music; cards, or poetry, heraldry, philosophy, or some other dilettante interest.  We might classify these interests methodically, by reducing them to expressions of the three fundamental powers, the factors, that is to say, which go to make up the physiological constitution of man; and further, by considering these powers by themselves, and apart from any of the definite aims which they may subserve, and simply as affording three sources of possible pleasure, out of which every man will choose what suits him, according as he excels in one direction or another.