is gone.  “Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch; A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, A chorus ending from Euripides, And that’s enough” to bring the shock of disapproval, and with it disagreeable feeling- tone continues till disapproval is removed or approval is won.  If there be won this approval, other elements of disagreeableness, however great, can be endured.  The massive movement of the complex unified consciousness of a Socrates drinking hemlock, of a Jesus dying on the cross, whatever strong eddies of pain there be in it, is still toned agreeably, as it makes head conqueringly toward that end which each has ideally constructed as fit.” [Footnote:  H. G. Lord, in Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 388-89.] No reference has been made, in this summary of the factors which determine our estimate of the worth of personal ideals, to the bearing of these ideals upon other people’s lives.  Actually, of course, the social values of even primarily personal ideals are impossible to overlook, and often bulk larger than the merely personal values.  This whole side of the matter will be left for convenience, however, to the following chapter.

Epicureanism vs.  Puritanism.

Personal ideals have swung historically between two magnets, richness and purity, self-expression and self-repression, indulgence and asceticism.  The crux of the individual’s problem is the question how much repression is necessary; and man’s answer has wavered somewhere between these extremes, which we may designate by the names of their best-known exemplars, Epicureanism and Puritanism.  Many differences in degree or detail there have been, of course, in the various historic embodiments of these ideals; but for the sake of making clear the fundamental contrast we may neglect these individual divergences and group together those on the one hand who have called men to a fuller, completer life and those who have summoned them to an austerer and purer life, free from taint of sin and regret.  We shall then put in the first group such well-known seers and poets as Epicurus, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman; we shall think of the Greek gods, of the Renaissance artists, the English cavaliers.  We shall think of the motto, “Carpe diem,” and “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”; and perhaps of Stevenson’s

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” [Footnote:  An excellent brief plea for this ideal of the life that shall be rich in experience can be found in Walter Pater’s Renaissance, the “Conclusion.”] In contrast to these followers are afraid of impulse, those who warn and rebuke and seek to save life from its pitfalls.  We shall think of Buddha, the Stoics, the Hebrew prophets, the mediaeval saints, Dante and Savonarola, the English and American Puritans, or, in modern times, of Tolstoy.  The ideal of such men is expressed not by the wholesomely happy and carefree Greek gods, but by haloed saint, by the calm-eyed Buddha of Eastern lands, by the figure of Christ on the cross.  The answer to the Epicurean’s heedlessness is expressed in such lines as “What is this world’s delight?  Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright.”