The second answer is that by ignoring the ultimate end we _install proximate ends in its place_. The reform movements of our day abstain from attempting to set up an ultimate good. They are content, as they say, “to evaluate the tangible goods ready at hand.” In consequence these tangible goods inevitably usurp the place of the supreme good. Begin as we may with the high notion of personality, we become materialists before we have proceeded very far, and we infect the laboring masses with our materialism if we omit to define the relation of proximate ends to the ultimate aim. For remember that the ultimate end is that which prescribes the limits within which the nearer aims are to be sanctioned,—the limit for each being the degree in which it conduces toward the highest end. Without a goal set up, without an explicit conception of its regulative function, the proximate ends abound, and are likely to expand _ad indefinitum_. This is evident, for instance, in the case of wealth-getting. The poor have not enough wealth, the rich have too much. “Let us then redress the balance by at least securing enough for the poor. The necessary limitations we can discuss after they shall have at least reached the limit of sufficiency.” But we are thus kindling the desire for wealth; and this desire and its possible gratifications are boundless. It is in the nature of desire to be prolific of new desire, and to aim unceasingly at new satisfactions. First, a decent dwelling, sufficient food, education for the children, are wanted, then luxury, then millions, then multi-millions. Secondary motives take the place of primary ones. Wealth becomes a token; the satisfactions it gives are no longer related to actual wants or needs, but solely to a fantastic desire for preëminence. Has not this been the actual history of many of those who have risen from poverty to great riches? But the same desires are present, though suppressed, unsatisfied, in the masses, who look up to the few with admiration or envy. And suppressed desires are often even more insidiously poisoning, more contaminating in their effects than satisfied desires. The psychological fact is that human volition as expressed in action is always determined by some end. A means is never adopted without there being some object or purpose in view. Leave out the ultimate aim and the means become themselves the ends. A decent subsistence should be treated as related to the ultimate end,— a decent living, for example, as a means to fit the worker for the duties of fatherhood and citizenship.