is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t.  You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.  Of course it was.  You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul.  But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.  By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another.  And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will.  To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.  If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, “Will something,” that is tantamount to saying, “I do not mind what you will,” and that is tantamount to saying, “I have no will in the matter.”  You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.  A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—­will to anything.  He only wants humanity to want something.  But humanity does want something.  It wants ordinary morality.  He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything.  But we have willed something.  We have willed the law against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition.  They cannot will, they can hardly wish.  And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily.  It can be found in this fact:  that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out.  But it is quite the opposite.  Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.  To desire action is to desire limitation.  In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.  When you choose anything, you reject everything else.  That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.  Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion.  Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.  If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton.  If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon.  It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense.  For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with “Thou shalt not”; but it is surely obvious that “Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will.”  “I will go to the Lord Mayor’s Show, and thou shalt not stop me.”  Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits.  But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits.  Art