Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice. Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent, but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal devil lurking in the universe.) This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan, of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are