=The Problem of Equating Personal and General Happiness.=--Much moral speculation has been devoted to the problem of equating personal happiness and regard for the general good. Right moral action, it is assumed, consists especially of justice and benevolence,--attitudes which aim at the good of others. But, it is also assumed, a just and righteous order of the universe requires that the man who seeks the happiness of others should also himself be a happy man. Much ingenuity has been directed to explaining away and accounting for the seeming discrepancies: the cases where men not conspicuous for regard for others or for maintaining a serious and noble view of life seem to maintain a banking-credit on the side of happiness; while men devoted to others, men conspicuous for range of sympathetic affections, seem to have a debit balance. The problem is the more serious because the respective good and ill fortunes do not seem to be entirely accidental and external, but to come as results from the moral factors in behavior. It would not be difficult to build up an argument to show that while extreme viciousness or isolated egoism is unfavorable to happiness, so also are keenness and breadth of affections. The argument would claim that the most comfortable course of life is one in which the man cultivates enough intimacies with enough persons to secure for himself their support and aid, but avoids engaging his sympathies too closely in their affairs and entangling himself in any associations which would require self-sacrifice or exposure to the sufferings of others: a course of life in which the individual shuns those excesses of vice which injure health, wealth, and lessen the decent esteem of others, but also shuns enterprises of precarious virtue and devotion to high and difficult ends.