THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 







That is why the aspiring youth has not made a choice as 

 he thinks, but has only expressed a paradox, when he 

 says exultingly: "I choose Ideals rather than Gold." 

 Everybody chooses Ideals; it is only that the ideals of 

 one are associated with things more obviously and di- 

 rectly purchaseable with gold; those of another with 

 things less directly and obviously purchaseable. 



Let us then frankly recognise and as frankly admit 

 that in this practical world a certain amount of practical 

 success is essential to happiness. The man who nurses 

 an ideal in poverty will not, as a rule, be able to pursue 

 that ideal so far as would be possible were he surrounded 

 by material comforts. Hunger may sometimes have 

 inspired the visions of a fanatic; but the saner creations 

 of genius are conceived without the stimulus of an empty 

 stomach. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say, with 

 the old Greek Dion Halicarnassus: "No generous 

 thoughts can suggest themselves to a man in want of 

 the necessaries of life." 



Certain it is, on the other hand, that no inconsiderable 

 part of the world's creative intellectual work has been per- 

 formed by men who could scarcely have worked so well 

 if indeed they could have done their work at all had 

 not fortune favored them, in the ordinary materialistic 

 sense of the words. 



We are on the whole much too prone to think of genius 

 as starving in a garret. In reality, the highest genius is 

 usually associated with perhaps is never dissevered 

 from the capacity for practical achievement. Shake- 

 speare made a fortune with his pen, in an age when 



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