I shall be told that I want to do away with ambition, and that ambition is the great motive-power of existence, and that therefore I am an enemy of society and the truth is not in me.  But I do not want to do away with ambition.  What I say is that current ambitions usually result in disappointment, that they usually mean the complete distortion of a life.  This is an incontestable fact, and the reason of it is that ambitions are chosen either without knowledge of their real value or without knowledge of what they will cost.  A disciplined brain will at once show the unnecessariness of most ambitions, and will ensure that the remainder shall be conducted with reason.  It will also convince its possessor that the ambition to live strictly according to the highest common sense during the next twenty-four hours is an ambition that needs a lot of beating.

XV

L.S.D.

Anybody who really wishes to talk simple truth about money at the present time is confronted by a very serious practical difficulty.  He must put himself in opposition to the overwhelming body of public opinion, and resign himself to being regarded either as a poseur, a crank, or a fool.  The public is in search of happiness now, as it was a million years ago.  Money is not the principal factor in happiness.  It may be argued whether, as a factor in happiness, money is of twentieth-rate importance or fiftieth-rate importance.  But it cannot be argued whether money, in point of fact, does or does not of itself bring happiness.  There can be no doubt whatever that money does not bring happiness.  Yet, in face of this incontrovertible and universal truth, the whole public behaves exactly as if money were the sole or the principal preliminary to happiness.  The public does not reason, and it will not listen to reason; its blood is up in the money-hunt, and the philosopher might as well expostulate with an earthquake as try to take that public by the button-hole and explain.  If a man sacrifices his interest under the will of some dead social tyrant in order to marry whom he wishes, if an English minister of religion declines twenty-five thousand dollars a year to go into exile and preach to New York millionaires, the phenomenon is genuinely held to be so astounding that it at once flies right round the world in the form of exclamatory newspaper articles!  In an age when such an attitude towards money is sincere, it is positively dangerous—­I doubt if it may not be harmful—­to persist with loud obstinacy that money, instead of being the greatest, is the least thing in the world.  In times of high military excitement a man may be ostracised if not lynched for uttering opinions which everybody will accept as truisms a couple of years later, and thus the wise philosopher holds his tongue—­lest it should be cut out.  So at the zenith of a period when the possession of money in absurd masses is an infallible means to the general respect, I have no intention either of preaching or of practising quite all that I privately in the matter of riches.