What I ought to do is this!  I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings among whom I have to steer, the living environment out of which I have to manufacture my happiness, are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I have to be myself; are precisely my equals in the face of Nature; are capable of being explained as I am capable of being explained; are entitled to the same latitude as I am entitled to, and are no more responsible for their composition and their environment than I for mine.  I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.  Why not?  Having thus reflected in a general manner, I ought to take one by one the individuals with whom I am brought into frequent contact, and seek, by a deliberate effort of the imagination and the reason, to understand them, to understand why they act thus and thus, what their difficulties are, what their ‘explanation’ is, and how friction can be avoided.  So I ought to reflect, morning after morning, until my brain is saturated with the cases of these individuals.  Here is a course of discipline.  If I follow it I shall gradually lose the preposterous habit of blaming, and I shall have laid the foundations of that quiet, unshakable self-possession which is the indispensable preliminary of conduct according to reason, of thorough efficiency in the machine of happiness.  But something in me, something distinctly base, says:  ’Yes.  The put-yourself-in-his-place business over again!  The do-unto-others business over again!’ Just so!  Something in me is ashamed of being ‘moral.’ (You all know the feeling!) Well, morals are naught but another name for reasonable conduct; a higher and more practical form of egotism—­an egotism which, while freeing others, frees myself.  I have tried the lower form of egotism.  And it has failed.  If I am afraid of being moral, if I prefer to cut off my nose to spite my face, well, I must accept the consequences.  But truth will prevail.

VIII

THE DAILY FRICTION

It is with common daily affairs that I am now dealing, not with heroic enterprises, ambitions, martyrdoms.  Take the day, the ordinary day in the ordinary house or office.  Though it comes seven times a week, and is the most banal thing imaginable, it is quite worth attention.  How does the machine get through it?  Ah! the best that can be said of the machine is that it does get through it, somehow.  The friction, though seldom such as to bring matters to a standstill, is frequent—­the sort of friction that, when it occurs in a bicycle, is just sufficient to annoy the rider, but not sufficient to make him get off the machine and examine the bearings.  Occasionally the friction is very loud; indeed, disturbing, and at rarer intervals it shrieks, like an omnibus brake out of order.  You know those days when you have