a case he will follow the advice that Horace gives in his epistle
to Maecenas.[3]

[Footnote 1: _Vie de Descartes_, par Baillet. Liv. vii., ch. 10.]

[Footnote 2: vii. 12.]

[Footnote 3: Lib. 1., ep. 7.]

_Nec somnum plebis laudo, satur altilium, nec
Otia divitiis Arabum liberrima muto_.

It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the inner for the outer man,
to give the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure and
independence for splendor, rank, pomp, titles and honor. This is what
Goethe did. My good luck drew me quite in the other direction.

The truth which I am insisting upon here, the truth, namely, that the
chief source of human happiness is internal, is confirmed by that most
accurate observation of Aristotle in the _Nichomachean Ethics_[1] that
every pleasure presupposes some sort of activity, the application of
some sort of power, without which it cannot exist. The doctrine of
Aristotle's, that a man's happiness consists in the free exercise
of his highest faculties, is also enunciated by Stobaeus in his
exposition of the Peripatetic philosophy[2]: _happiness_, he says,
_means vigorous and successful activity in all your undertakings_; and
he explains that by _vigor [Greek: aretae]_ he means _mastery_ in any
thing, whatever it be. Now, the original purpose of those forces with
which nature has endowed man is to enable him to struggle against the
difficulties which beset him on all sides. But if this struggle comes
to an end, his unemployed forces become a burden to him; and he has to
set to work and play with them,--to use them, I mean, for no purpose
at all, beyond avoiding the other source of human suffering, boredom,
to which he is at once exposed. It is the upper classes, people of
wealth, who are the greatest victims of boredom. Lucretius long ago
described their miserable state, and the truth of his description may
be still recognized to-day, in the life of every great capital--where
the rich man is seldom in his own halls, because it bores him to be
there, and still he returns thither, because he is no better off
outside;--or else he is away in post-haste to his house in the
country, as if it were on fire; and he is no sooner arrived there,
than he is bored again, and seeks to forget everything in sleep, or
else hurries back to town once more.

[Footnote 1: i. 7 and vii. 13, 14.]

[Footnote 2: Ecl. eth. ii., ch 7.]

_Exit saepe foras magnis ex aedibus ille,
Esse domi quem pe