THE PROBLEM OF HAPPINESS 



opinions that are not founded in a fetich? Yet time 

 out of mind man has boasted that he is the one think- 

 ing animal. 



We know that the prizes for clear thinking are mul- 

 tiform; that they include, in fact, almost all the good 

 and desirable things in the world. We know that the 

 penalty for slovenly thinking is mental mediocrity, lack 

 of scholarship, failure in all that is best in life. Yet we 

 live on in a perpetual mental twilight, never acquiring 

 the habits of thinking that could dissipate the haze and 

 give us a clear perspective. In moments of enthusiasm, 

 fitful and infrequent, we rise toward the light, only to 

 settle back anon into the mists of vague, ambiguous, 

 unfruitful reverie. At night we sleep and assume that 

 our minds are inactive, yet for the most part, the record 

 of the night is scarcely more a blank when morning 

 comes than is the mental record of the day that preceded 

 it. We assume that we are awake and mentally active 

 during the day; but where is the record of the day's 

 thoughts? In truth, we were not so wide awake as we 

 supposed. Thoreau's cynical comment that he had 

 never seen a man who was more than half awake, 

 is justified in our own experience. 



Yet Thoreau was the friend of Emerson and Haw- 

 thorne and Lowell and the rest of the brilliant New 

 England coterie. Were they too only half awake? 

 If so, there would seem but little hope for the ordinary 

 mortal. 



Still it is always worth while to do one's best. The 

 comparative degree of thinking is not to be scorned, 

 even if the superlative is plainly out of reach. Despite 



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