MORE IMPASSIONED AND REFLECTIVE MAN. 37 



It is of little use to argue either with the habitual 

 approver or the habitual censor. Physiological organi- 

 sation makes them what they are ; hence it would be 

 well for the approved not to be too elated, and the 

 scolded not too much cast down. It is curious to note 

 that the detractor puts the golden age in the past 

 while the appreciator puts it in the future. It is in 

 both a creation of the brain . 



An acute observer of life has said that youth is a 

 blunder, manhood a struggle, and old age a regret. 

 The remark is especially true of the slowly maturing, 

 impassioned, and contemplative individual : his youth 

 is tenfold a blunder, and therefore his old age a tenfold 

 keener regret. From blundering to morality or immo- 

 rality is not a long step. The moral code and the 

 moral practice of the two ruling temperaments are 

 probably not materially dissimilar if a general balance 

 be struck. Goethe is strangely severe in his judgments 

 on action and on men of action. It may perhaps be 

 true, as he states, that action is easy, and thought, as 

 he understood it, difficult; but is it true that men of 

 action have no conscience ? They may not indulge in 

 the habit of taking their conscience to pieces and 

 showing all men the fragments and the process, but 

 nevertheless they surely have one. Would it not be 

 more correct to say that the busy energetic man 

 adopts a ready-made society conscience, while the 

 leisurely pensive man constructs or rather shapes his 

 own ? At root, all over the world, conscience is a 

 social need and a social product ; but is it true that 

 the article of private manipulation is always superior 

 to that fashioned by society and more or less common 

 to all ? 



The union of physiological fitness and the avocations 



