It is impossible to present a better summary of the essentials of happiness. As the author remarks, they are difficult to unite. Yet, whoever lacks either, must be peculiarly unfortunate, or indulgent to himself, if he cannot trace the want to some aberration or neglect of his own. Health, perhaps, is the least within our power; for, by the fault of our ancestors, we may have inherited a constitution and temperament essentially vitiated and unhealthy. We may lose health by casualty or by the influence of causes utterly beyond our knowledge or our control. But for one person thus afflicted with want of health, it is notorious that a hundred are so from causes which they may trace to their own mismanagement. Tranquillity of mind, is certainly a frame, on which we have a controlling influence. Whoever, in our country, has not competence, must assuredly seek the cause, if he have health, in his own want of industry or management. Most of the complaints of the caprice, infidelity and unworthiness of friends would have a more equitable application to our own want of temper, truth and disinterestedness. These things, indispensable to happiness, are far more subject to our command, than our self-flattery will allow us to imagine. The greater portion of those about us might unite all these advantages. Yet, if all misery, other than that which arises from want of being able to unite all these numerous and difficult requisites to happiness, were abstracted from human nature, I am confident that a moiety of the sorrows of earth would be removed; in other words, that a philosophic pursuit of happiness, would at once deliver us from more than half of our suffering here below. Note 11, page 59.