Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold.  I disagree that because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation is implied in the non-selected cases.  A man may go into the world as a child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in.  So the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted.  It is not that he could not love those others.  And I dispute that to love everybody is not to love at all.  To love two people is surely to love more than to love just one person, and so by way of three and four to a very large number.  But if it is put that love must be a preference because of the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend and understand more than a few of the multitudinous lovables of life, then I agree.  For all the individuals and things and cases for which we have inadequate time and energy, we need a wholesale method—­justice.  That is exactly what I have said in the previous section.

3.26.  The weakness of immaturity.

One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were always strong, some always weak.  But that is quite a misleading version of life.  Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we judge them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and learning and changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from the cradle to the grave.  We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term, pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none the less appropriate because the pupil-teacher taught badly and learnt under difficulties.

It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that “we have to remember” this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social and economic literature.  Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between a man A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere, and work or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis of immense schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and serenely regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal start occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had learnt and those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused transactions.  Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary aspects of these primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract relationship by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading fallacy in all these regions of thought.  At the present moment the average age of the world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death somewhen about 44 or 45, that is to say nearly