[1] It may be noted that the war has caused a recrudescence of this brutal “code of honour” in our own country. But here it has not troubled to resume the obsolete form of the duel. The “defender of his wife’s honour” simply commits murder, and the jury acquits. USE AND ORNAMENT (OR THE ART OF LIVING) (1915) I suppose you would all be very much surprised if I said that not use but ornament was the object of life. I refrain from doing so because so definite a statement makes an assumption of knowledge which it may always be outside man’s power to possess. The object of life may for ever remain as obscure to us as its cause. It seems, indeed, likely enough that the one ignorance hinges necessarily on the other, and that without knowing the cause of life neither can we know its object. The writers of the Scottish Church Catechism, it is true, thought that they knew why man was created. The social products of their cocksure theology cause me to doubt it. I would prefer to worship more ignorantly a more lovable deity than the one which is there presented to my gaze. But though we may never know why we are here, we may know, by taking a little thought and studying the manifestations of the life around us, what aspects of it make us glad that we are here. And gladness is as good a guide as any that I know to the true values of life. Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has overlaid all the mere uses of existence--things which without those embellishments might not delight us at all--or only as a dry crust of bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one dying of thirst. I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who claims to have been made “in God’s image.” Nothing that my senses respond to with delight stays limited within the utilitarian aspect on which its moral claims to acceptance are too frequently based--or remains a benefit merely material in its scope. When we breathe happily, when we eat happily, and when we love happily, we do not think of the utilitarian ends with which those bodily instincts are related. The utilitarian motive connects, but only subconsciously, with that sense of well-being and delight which then fills us; and the conscious life within us is happy without stooping to reason. Underlying our receptivity of these things is, no doubt, the fact that our bodies have a use for them. But were we to consider the material uses alone, our enjoyment would be less; and if (by following that process) we absorbed them in a less joyous spirit, our physical benefit, so science now tells us, would be less also.