It is clear that, if harmonious desires are what we should seek, love is better than hate, since, when two people love each other, both can be satisfied, whereas when they hate each other one at most can achieve the object of his desire. It is obvious also that desire for knowledge is to be encouraged, since the knowledge that a man acquires is not obtained by taking it away from some one else; but a desire for (say) large landed estates can only be satisfied in a small minority. Desire for power over other people is a potent source of conflict, and is therefore to be discouraged; a respect for the liberty of others is one of the things that ought to be developed by the right kind of education. The impulse towards personal achievement ought to go into such things as artistic creation or scientific discovery or the promotion of useful institutions--in a word, into activities that are creative rather than possessive. Knowledge, which may do positive harm where men’s desires conflict (for example, by showing how to make war more deadly), will have only good results in a world where men’s desires harmonise, since it tends to show how their common desires are to be realised. The conclusion may be summed up in a single phrase: _The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge_.[11] [11] Cf. _What I Believe_, by the present author--To-day and To-morrow Series. PART IV THE UNIVERSE CHAPTER XXIII SOME GREAT PHILOSOPHIES OF THE PAST Our discussions, hitherto, have been concerned very largely with Man, but Man on his own account is not the true subject-matter of philosophy. What concerns philosophy is the universe as a whole; Man demands consideration solely as the instrument by means of which we acquire knowledge of the universe. And that is why it is human beings as capable of knowledge that have concerned us mainly in past chapters, rather than as centres of will or of emotion. We are not in the mood proper to philosophy so long as we are interested in the world only as it affects human beings; the philosophic spirit demands an interest in the world for its own sake. But since we apprehend the world through our own senses, and think about it with our own intellect, the picture that we acquire is inevitably coloured by the personal medium through which it comes to us. Consequently we have to study this medium, namely ourselves, in order to find out, if we can, what elements in our picture of the world are contributed by us, and what elements we may accept as representative of outside fact. Previous chapters have studied cognition, both as an outwardly observable reaction, and as it appears to introspection. In the chapters that remain, we shall be concerned with what we can know about the universe, in view of the nature of the instrument that we have to employ. I do not think we can know as much as many philosophers of the past have supposed, but I think it is worth while to have in our minds an outline of