Yet it is this last stage which plainly constitutes the goal of moral effect, for here alone the adult once again [p180] recovers that harmony between himself and his environment which he lost in that period of infancy when he first discovered that his wishes were no longer sovereign. It is the memory of that earliest harmony which he carries with him all his days. This is his memory of a golden age, his intimation, as Wordsworth says, of immortality. But insofar as he expects by an infantile philosophy to recover that heaven which lay about him in his infancy, he is doomed to disappointment. In the womb, and for a few years of his childhood, happiness was the gratification of his naive desires. His family arranged the world to suit his wishes. But as he grows up, and begins to be an independent personality, this providence ministering to his wishes disappears. He can then no longer hope that the world will be adjusted to his wishes, and he is compelled by a long and difficult process of learning and training to adjust his wishes to the world. If he succeeds he is mature. If he is mature, he is once again harmonious with the nature of things. He has virtue. And he is happy. The process of maturing consists then of a revision of his desires in the light of an understanding of reality. When he is completely infantile there is nothing in the world but his wishes. Therefore, he does not need and does not have an understanding of the outer world. It exists for him merely as gratification or denial. But as he begins to learn that the universe is not composed of his wishes, he begins to see his wishes in a context and in perspective. He begins to acquire a sense of space and to learn how much there is beyond his reach, until at last he realizes how small a figure he is on this earth, and how small a part of the universe is the solar system of which [p181] ours is one of the smaller planets. He has learned a lot from the days when he put out his hand and reached for the moon. He begins, also, to acquire a sense of time and to realize that the moment in which he feels the intense desire to seize something is an instant in a lifetime, an infinitesimal point in the history of the race. He acquires a sense of birth and decay and death, a knowledge that that which he craves, his craving itself, and he himself who feels that craving, did not have this craving yesterday and will no longer have it to-morrow. He acquires a sense of cause and effect, a knowledge, that is to say, that the sequences of events are not to be interrupted by his preferences. He begins to discern the existence of other beings beside himself, and to understand that they too have their preferences and their wishes, that these wishes are often contrary to his own, and that there is not room enough in the world, nor are there things enough, to gratify all the wishes of everybody.