Let us go back for a few decades and see if we can catch the values of our time confusedly shaping themselves within the framework of human life. I say shaping themselves, for as Nietzsche said fifty years ago, the time of the conscious valuers has passed; our values for a century have not been created, they have happened. They happened because men had become skeptical not merely of God, or of the existence of a moral order, but of life itself, and could not set before themselves any purpose justifying life, but only its bare mechanism, work, duty, the preservation of society. It has been, thus, one of the main achievements of modern thought to banish from the world the notion of enjoyment. This was begun first in a philosophical way by the utilitarians, who were reasonably convinced that, factories existing for the first time as far as they knew in history, it was incumbent on men to work in them. A fine philosophy, truly; yet men believed in it. After the utilitarians came the advocates of self-help, who showed that the utilitarian policy might not be without individual advantage; that if one cut off one’s pleasures, or at least those which cost money, one might win a bizarre, undreamed-of success. The anchorites of wealth arose, the great men who, when they had acquired riches which might have built a new Florence, if scarcely a new Jerusalem, could make no use of them, preferring to teach in Sunday-schools and endow universities. In the eyes of these men wealth was justified only if it could not be enjoyed, for enjoyment was the one thing which went against all their ideas, all those instincts which had set them where they stood. Wealth, thus, could not be enjoyed, could not be used, for when they had reached their end the means still remained means.