The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritating because it is dull.  It prepares the mind for a little sermon in the style of the Vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfied with our countrified innocence and our simple village sports.  The word, however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected; the “sweet content” of the poet and the “cubic content” of the mathematician.  Some distinguish these by stressing the different syllables.  Thus, it might happen to any of us, at some social juncture, to remark gaily, “Of the content of the King of the Cannibal Islands’ Stewpot I am content to be ignorant”; or “Not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe, you are stealing the spoons.”  And there really is an analogy between the mathematical and the moral use of the term, for lack of the observation of which the latter has been much weakened and misused.

The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved in so far that the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insane peril of our tall and toppling cities.  Content suggests some kind of security; and it is not strange that our workers should often think about rising above their position, since they have so continually to think about sinking below it.  The philanthropist who urges the poor to saving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets.  To advise people to be content with what they have got may or may not be sound moral philosophy.

But to urge people to be content with what they haven’t got is a piece of impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon.  But though the creed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs, it remains true for the normal of mortal life.  We speak of divine discontent; discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content must always be the human thing.  It may be true that a particular man, in his relation to his master or his neighbour, to his country or his enemies, will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angry justice.  But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that man as a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posture towards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will be wise to cultivate dissatisfaction.  In a broad estimate of our earthly experience, the great truism on the tablet remains:  he must not covet his neighbour’s ox nor his ass nor anything that is his.  In highly complex and scientific civilisations he may sometimes find himself forced into an exceptional vigilance.  But, then, in highly complex and scientific civilisations, nine times out of ten, he only wants his own ass back.

But I wish to urge the case for cubic content; in which (even more than in moral content) I take a personal interest.  Now, moral content has been undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the other meaning.  It has become a negative rather than a positive thing.  In some accounts of contentment it seems to be little more than a meek despair.