THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



your fellows if you are to win their present approval 

 and their lasting gratitude ? I speak now of course to 

 the average man, not to the exceptional one whose work 

 of creative genius may give him fame regardless of 

 character. 



And to this average man I say: If you would live well 

 and die well in the best sense of the words; if you would 

 attain the highest happiness and the best rewards; 

 you must be at heart an optimist, in tender sympathy 

 with the needs, the aspirations, the weaknesses of your 

 fellow men. You must curb your egoism, and give 

 heed to those altruistic racial needs imposed by the very 

 nature of civilized existence. If you are strong, you 

 must pity, not merely dominate, the weak; reflecting 

 that your strength and their weakness alike are ac- 

 cidents of birth and education over which neither of 

 you had the slightest control. There is no more inde- 

 fensible or more contemptible human trait, than arro- 

 gant pride of race, of physical beauty, of mental apti- 

 tude, or of any capacity whatever which has come to us 

 through inheritance, and for which we are no more 

 responsible than for the number of our toes or ringers. 



Even those accomplishments that we have acquired 

 through education, or through what we speak of as the 

 exercise of our own skill or industry or frugality, should 

 not make us vain or arrogant, whatever the natural 

 gratification they afford us. For after all, these ac- 

 complishments are, in the last analysis, no less an en- 

 dowment from our ancestors than those physical and 

 mental traits that have just been referred to. We 

 should, in simple logic, be grateful for the inheritance 



[260! 



