Note * — Chapter VII · A Psychological Theory of Value

No individual can live one minute without a very intricate and, so far as it goes, very perfect co-ordination of impulses. It is only when we pass from the activities which from second to second maintain life to those which from hour to hour determine what kind of life it shall be, that we find wide differences. Fortunately for psychology we can each find wide enough differences in ourselves from hour to hour. Most people in the same day are Bonaparte and Oblomov by turns. Before breakfast Diogenes, after dinner Petronius or Bishop Usher. But throughout these mutations certain dispositions usually remain much the same, those which govern public behaviour in a limited number of affairs varying very greatly from one society or civilisation to another. Every systematisation in the degree to which it is stable involves a degree of sacrifice, but for some the price to be paid in opportunities foregone is greater than for others. By the extent of the loss, the range of impulses thwarted or starved, and their degree of importance, the merit of a systematisation is judged. That organisation which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best. Some individuals, hag-ridden by their vices, or their virtues, to a point at which the law of diminishing returns has deprived even these of their appropriate satisfactions, are still unable to reorganise; they go through life incapacitated for most of its possible enjoyments.* Others, paralysed with their conflicts, are unable to do anything freely; whatever they attempt some implicated but baffled impulse is still fitfully and fretfully stirring. The debauchee and the victim of conscience alike have achieved organisations whose price in sacrifice is excessive. Both their individual satisfactions, and those for which they are dependent upon sympathetic relations with their fellows, an almost equal group, are unduly restricted. Upon grounds of prudence alone they have been injudicious, and they may be condemned without any appeal to peculiarly ‘ethical’ standards. The muddle in which they are forced to live is itself sufficient ground for reprobation.