THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



A hundred tosses of the coin, a thousand even, may show 

 a preponderance of heads or of tails; but ten thousand 

 throws or fifty thousand will strike the balance. When 

 the business life of any man numbers its decisions by 

 the tens of thousands, mere chance might make half 

 the decisions right, but "luck" will come to the man 

 whose judgment gives the preponderance to the right 

 decisions as against the wrong ones. 



It is the province of judgment, then, to test ideas. 

 Judgment will temper creative imagination, holding in 

 check visionary flights and the over-exuberant play 

 of fancy. It will teach us that good ideas to have value 

 must be clear and explicit, must be susceptible of 

 lucid expression. It will guard against the mistake of 

 confounding obscurity with profundity of thought. 

 But we must not forget, on the other hand, that the use of 

 this selective faculty has its dangers. In some cases it 

 may produce over-caution and so hold us back to timid 

 conservatism. There is, for example, a school of mod- 

 ern historical critics that suffers from this fault. Its 

 votaries temper all accounts of past events with qualify- 

 ing clauses. They would reverse and modify the ver- 

 dict of history regarding almost all the noted characters 

 of the past. They would have us remember that after 

 all Nero was in many ways a good ruler; that Marcus 

 Aurelius was not so much better than his contemporaries. 

 They see in the Crusades a great colonising movement 

 with which religion after all had not much to do. Tney 

 are not quite sure that William the Conqueror accom- 

 plished a very sweeping victory at Hastings; or, at 

 least, they explain away the genius involved in the 



[it*.] 



