You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently respectable:  you love him because you love him; that is love, and any other only a derision and grimace.  It should be the same with all our actions.  If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life to a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him love one woman and be true to her till death.  But we should not conceive him as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand sinister compromises and considerations.  The one man might be wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly, respectable.  Does your soul ask profit?  Does it ask money?  Does it ask the approval of the indifferent herd?  I believe not.  For my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be decent at all, but to be good.

CHAPTER IV

We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.  Now, for us, that is ultimate.  It may be founded on some reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can follow or comprehend.  And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except in very lively and well-living natures; and between-whiles we must brush along without it.  Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right.  As a matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by the world’s chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to consider consequences and to keep an eye on profit.  For the soul adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and cares only to combine them for some common purpose which shall interest all.  Now, respect for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and the desire of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature of man; and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current doctrines, they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves all the worthy parts of man.  These, then, must also be suffered to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little according as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.