The exhausting character of choice, of making up one’s mind, is a matter of common experience. In some way the mental synthesis, this calling in and reducing to order the errant population of the mind, draws severely upon the vital energy, and one of the invariable signs of fatigue is a dread of making decisions and assuming responsibility. In our complicated life the will can, in fact, manage only a small part of the competing suggestions that are within our reach. What we are all forced to do is to choose a field of action which for some reason we look upon as specially interesting or important, and exercise our choice in that; in other matters protecting ourselves, for the most part, by some sort of mechanical control—some accepted personal authority, some local custom, some professional tradition, or the like. Indeed, to know where and how to narrow the activity of the will in order to preserve its tone and vigor for its most essential functions, is a great part of knowing how to live. An incontinent exercise of choice wears people out, so that many break down and yield even essentials to discipline and authority in some form; while many more wish, at times, to do so and indulge themselves, perhaps, in Thomas à Kempis, or “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” Not a few so far exhaust the power of self-direction as to be left drifting at the mercy of undisciplined passions. There are many roads to degeneracy, and persons of an eager, strenuous nature not infrequently take this one.