(4) But the most imperious need of life lies in the tracing-out and paying heed to these extrinsic values, these after effects of conduct.  The drinking of alcoholic liquors, for example, not only stills a craving that arises in a man’s mind, not only brings pleasure of taste and comfort of oblivion, not only brings the quick revulsion of emotional staleness and headache, but has its gradual and inevitable effects in undermining the constitution, lessening the power of resistance to disease, and decreasing the vitality of offspring.  Quite commonly these ultimate consequences are the most important, and so the determining, factors in deciding our ideals.  Among them may be included the influence of single acts in increasing or decreasing the power to resist future temptations, and the gradual paralysis of the will through unchecked self-indulgence.

(5) Another important aspect of any moral situation lies in the rejection which every choice involves.  Not only must we ask what a given impulse has to offer us, in immediate and remote satisfaction; we must consider what alternative goods its adoption precludes.  What might we have been doing with our time and strength or money?  Is this act not only a good one, is it the best one for that moment of our lives?  An important function of ideals is to point us to realms of happiness into which our preexisting impulses might never have led us, and whose existence we might scarcely have suspected.

(6) Finally, we may ask of every proposed line of conduct, what will be its worth to us in memory?  Not only in our leisure hours, but in a current of subconscious reflection that accompanies our active life, we constantly live in the presence of our past.  And the nature of memory is such that it cannot well retain the traces of certain of our keenest pleasures, but can continually feed us upon other joys of our past.  It is imperative, then, for a happy life, so to live that the years are pleasant to look back upon.  Vicious self-indulgence and selfishness are rarely satisfying in retrospection, whereas all courage and heroism and tenderness are a source of unending comfort.  For better or worse, we are, and cannot shirk being, judges of our own conduct.  We may be prejudiced, and may properly try to correct our prejudices; we may discount our own disapprovals, and seek to escape from our own self-condemnation.  But after all, we must live with ourselves; and it pays to aim to please not only the evanescent impulses whose disapproval will soon be forgotten, but that more deeply rooted and insistent judgment that cannot wholly be stilled.  Regret and remorse are among the greatest poisoners of happiness, and prospective ideals must bear that truth in mind.  “No matter what other elements in any moment of consciousness may tend to give it agreeable tone, if there is not the element of approval, there is not yet any deep, wide, and lasting pleasantness for consciousness.  A flash of light here, a casual word there, and it