In converting, then, a mere notional assent to the proposition that wealth is desirable into an actual hunger for it, which is painful if not satisfied, the essential cause is a belief that the desired wealth is attainable; and the intensity of the hunger is in proportion to the vitality of the belief. This important psychological truth is very easily demonstrable by a kind of experience sufficiently familiar to most people. If a man who has perfect taste, and a few thousands a year, is buying furniture for his house, and is anxious that every room shall be as beautiful as it is in his power to make it, we all of us know with what eagerness day after day he will stare into the windows of the dealers in old furniture and _bric-à-brac_, and how quickly he will take note of any object that his taste approves. Now if such a man, having admired a cabinet or a piece of tapestry, finds that the price of it is a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds, he will feel perhaps that it is a little beyond his means; but he will dream of it, long for it, and will never know a moment’s peace till he has so arranged his expenditure as to enable him to complete the purchase. But if the price of the cabinet or the tapestry, instead of being a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds, had been a thousand or fifteen hundred, he would have recognised that the objects were totally beyond his reach, and though they still excited admiration in him, they would {365} excite no desire. Here is the great difference between the necessaries of life and the luxuries. Men crave for the former, whether they are able to procure them or no. They crave for the latter only in proportion as they feel them to be procurable. A starving boy does not want a bun the less because he has not a penny to buy it with. A man of taste, with only a hundred pounds to spend, does not crave for a piece of tapestry at all, if he knows that the lowest price for it would be not less than a thousand.