Perhaps the discomfort of doing one’s duty is an inseparable incident of the storage of energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one’s duty, an incident of the leakage of energy. When I get up and poke the fire, because I see it will go out if I don’t, I return to my chair a more energetic being than I was the moment before. At any rate, our oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind from the earliest times, and has given rise to all the dualistic philosophies. The great fact as to the reality of the struggle is proved to us, not merely by our own consciousness, but because we can see the logical results of it everywhere in society. A community is a collection of palpitating animals. Each of us is one of them, and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions hourly. We get heard. We have our exact weight and force. There is no difficulty about our power of intercourse. Indeed it is the thing we cannot get away from. No man walks by himself. Between his feet and the ground are invisible pedals that play upon, and are played upon by other men. You cannot live or move except by transmitting influence. The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and shut valves in other people. There is no other way of serving your fellows; there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting your substance. We saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held up what we call the evils of politics. Money interest shaded off into prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, and that into indifference. The striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different shades of selfishness, lack of energy, and inability to use the mind accurately. So also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the laborer or by the journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him out of employment. In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike, turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler, or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it with some one else’s eyes. It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or bad cooking. There is no such special province in life as morality. Each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish. A proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job, that a musician shows over a weak phrasing.