asceticism; it is at bottom a moral hygiene simply—which ought to be made a part of physical hygiene. A surgeon knows that he must lead a severe and continent life, or his hand will lose its cunning. The very condition of his being able to aid other people is that he in a measure suffer privation himself; he must choose. And to make this choice he experiences no need of a religious injunction, he requires only the voice of conscience. It suffices for him to know enough of moral hygiene to foresee the distant results of his conduct and to possess a sufficient measure of firmness to be self-consistent. It is after this fashion that, in plotting out one’s life according to scientific laws, one may regulate it, may render it almost as hard as that of the most self-denying monk. Every profession that is freely chosen is in the nature of a self-imposed discipline. As to the choice of no profession, as to voluntary idleness—that is in and of itself immoral and necessarily leads to immorality, whatever may be the religion that one holds. [Sidenote: Asceticism results in a preoccupation with sin.] The ultimate consequence of excessive rigourism is morbid preoccupation with sin: an obsession which, with the fear of the millennium, is one of the greatest of the futile tortures that have afflicted humanity. It is as dangerous for man to magnify his vices as his virtues; to believe one’s self a monster possesses no greater exemption from evil consequences than to believe one’s self perfect. Sin in itself, and philosophically considered, is a conception difficult to reconcile with the modern idea of scientific determinism, which, when it has explained everything, goes far, if not toward justifying everything, at least toward pardoning everything. Neither the pangs nor the vanity of sin are permissible to us nowadays when we are hardly certain really that our own sins belong to us. Temptation comes to us in the guise of the reawaking of an hereditary appetite, handed down to us not only from the first man, but from the ancestors of the first man, or more accurately from life itself, from the universe, from the God who is immanent in the world or who transcends it, and has created it; it is not the devil that tempts us, it is God. Like Jacob, of whom we were speaking a moment ago, we must vanquish God, must subject life to thought, must give the victory to the higher forms of life, as against the lower. If we are wounded in this struggle, if we are branded with the mark of sin, if we mount haltingly up the steps of goodness, we ought not to be immeasurably terrified: the essential thing is to go upward. Temptation is not in and of itself a blot, it may be even an emblem of nobility so long as one does not yield to it. Our first fathers were not subject to temptation, properly so called, because they yielded to all their desires, because they made no struggle against them. Sin or moral evil is explicable: first by the antagonism