(ii.) Take the case of amusement or recreation. To an adult usually engaged in strenuous pursuits, the thought of a pleasure for the mere sake of pleasure, of enjoyment, of having a "good time," may appeal as an end. And if the pleasure is itself "innocent," only the requirements of a preconceived theory (like the Kantian) would question its legitimacy. Even its moral necessity is clear when relaxation is conducive to cheerfulness and efficiency in more serious pursuits. But if a man discriminates mentally between himself and the play or exercise in which he finds enjoyment and relief, thinking of himself as a distinct end to which the latter is merely means, he is not likely to get the recreation. It is by forgetting the self, that is by taking the light and easy activity _as_ the self of the situation, that the benefit comes. To be a "lover of pleasure" in the bad sense is precisely to seek amusements as excitements for a self which somehow remains outside them as their fixed and ulterior end. (iii.) Exactly the same analysis applies to the idea of the moral culture of the self, of its moral perfecting. Every serious-minded person has, from time to time, to take stock of his status and progress in moral matters--to take thought of the moral self just as at other times he takes thought of the health of the bodily self. But woe betides that man who, having entered upon a course of reflection which leads to a clearer conception of his own moral capacities and weaknesses, maintains that thought as a distinct mental end, and thereby makes his subsequent acts simply means to improving or perfecting his moral nature. Such a course defeats itself. At the least, it leads to priggishness, and its tendency is towards one of the worst forms of selfishness: a habit of thinking and feeling that persons, that concrete situations and relations, exist simply to render contributions to one's own precious moral character. The worst of such selfishness is that having protected itself with the mantle of interest in moral goodness, it is proof against that attrition of experience which may always recall a man to himself in the case of grosser and more unconscious absorption. A sentimentally refined egoism is always more hopeless than a brutal and naïve one--though a brutal one not infrequently protects itself by adoption and proclamation of the language of the former.