the millions of average men will be rendered by the want of honour incalculably more miserable than they could be by want of wealth. If, therefore, inequality in the possession of external goods, for which many men struggle, and which only a minority can secure, necessarily means unhappiness for the larger part of the community, this evil at all events is not due to the existing structure of society, but is, on the contrary, so rooted in the constitution of human nature, that even the wildest and completest schemes of social reform are unable to offer us so much as a mitigation of it. The second answer to the objection, however, is of quite a different, and of a far more reassuring {357} character. It is that the entire supposition on which the objection rests is untrue. The external prizes of life, of which exceptional wealth is the type, though struggled for by many with every faculty they possess, though valued by those who achieve them, and though recognised by men in general as something of which everybody would choose to be the possessor if he could be, do nevertheless amongst average human beings not cause any unhappiness by their absence at all corresponding to the satisfaction which they cause notoriously by their presence. Such an assertion will to many people probably seem self-contradictory. But if it does so, this will simply be owing to the fact that the whole science of the subjective conditions of happiness has been utterly neglected by sociological writers hitherto. The assertion here made, however paradoxical it may sound, embodies one of the most important truths which can claim the sociologist’s attention; and though it cannot be called self-evident, every student of social science should be familiar with it. It forms, indeed, the _pons asinorum_ of all social psychology. A brief elucidation of it will be enough for our present purpose. There is a certain minimum of external goods, the desire for which has a physiological basis, and causes, when unsatisfied, misery, disease, or death. Chief amongst such goods are food and, in most climates, clothes and shelter. So far as this minimum is concerned, the desires of all are practically equal; and they are equal because they arise out of that physical {358} constitution which we cannot alter, and in respect of which we are all similar. But for external goods that are beyond this minimum men’s desires vary indefinitely; and they vary because they depend on the action of the imagination and the intellect, which varies in different men, and in the same men under different circumstances.