In many other cases, the consequences may be just as contrary to our interests, though they lie beyond our own experience and present understanding. For that reason people have been taught throughout the centuries to accept and be guided by the accumulated experience and wisdom of those who have gone before. This accumulated experience has been preserved and made available to each new generation, in many ways--traditions, conventions, customs, familiar quotations, standard books, the schools and the Bible. Most of all, it has been the special care and function of parents to instill it into their children. For the first ten or fifteen years of life, children are constantly being told what to do and what not to do, in all sorts of contingencies. And what they are told is the result of accumulated experience in crystallized practical form. In the days of obedience, discipline and fear of punishment, children accepted and respected this guidance, as authoritative. They formed the habit of doing not what they felt like, but what was considered right and best for them. Very often the true reasons, the complicated motives and remote consequences, involved in a question of conduct were not comprehended by the young people, and only vaguely sensed by their parents. They were traditional ideas, generally approved by right-minded people and passed along. Their origin, in nearly all cases, was the accumulated experience and wisdom of people who did comprehend. So it happens that a young woman, or a young man, of the new school, without respect for old-fashioned teachings, and with insufficient experience, or knowledge of their own, can fall into the error of imagining that their selfish interests are best served by gratifying each passing inclination. Their first shallow mistake, as I have tried to show, is in overlooking the lessons of others' experience. This whole point-of-view, of course, is absolutely selfish and for the time being, I have been content to meet them on their own ground and answer them in terms of absolute selfishness. Even on the assumption that a human being is a kind of animal, which feels no need of consideration for others' welfare, and is devoid of any higher aspirations than a full measure of selfish enjoyment--even then, purely as a question of intelligence, a matter of policy, there are excellent reasons why various impulses and inclinations should be resisted and denied. The nature of these reasons I have attempted to suggest and make clear by some haphazard examples and as previously noted, the basis of them all is Experience. IV AFFECTION There remain two other sets of reasons why our selfish inclinations should often be denied--affection and faith. They are of a higher and finer order. We will take them one at a time.