(3) Even when an act superficially egoistic conflicts with one that seems altruistic, the greatest good of the community often dictates the former. There is, as Trumbull used to put it, a "duty of refusing to do good." A man who can best serve the common good by concentrating his strength on that work where his particular ability or training makes him most effective, may be justified in refusing other calls upon his energies, however intrinsically worthy. An Edison would be doing wrong to spend his afternoons in social service, a Burbank has no right to diminish his resources by giving a public library. Emerson deserves our commendation for refusing to be inveigled into the various causes that would have drafted his time and strength. Even to the anti-slavery agitation he refused his services, saying, "I have quite other slaves to free than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, which have no watchman or lover or defender but me." This brings us to the question how far a man may legitimately live a self- contained life. Certainly there is a measure of truth in Goethe's saying, "No man can he isolates himself"; in Ibsen's "The most powerful man is he who is most alone"; and in Matthew Arnold's "Alone the sun rises, and alone Spring the great streams." A multiplicity of interests distracts the soul and often confuses our ideals. By keeping free from social burdens some men, like Kant, have accomplished tasks of unusual magnitude. On the other hand, we can match Goethe's assertion with another of his own: "A talent forms itself in solitude, a character in the stream of the world." Isolation tends almost inevitably to narrowness, to an abnormal and cramped outlook, to willfulness or Pharisaism, and usually to loneliness and depression. The only pervasively happy life for man is the life of cooperation and loyalty. We may well "withdraw into the silence," take our daily communion with God in our closets, or our forty days in the wilderness, to win clearer vision and steadier purpose. But solitude should, in normal cases, be only an interlude of rest, or a quiet maturing for service. The ideal is perhaps expressed in Wordsworth's sonnet on Milton: "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart. .... And yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay."