not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a “natural” man as you or I. But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful amalgam of both. What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.