your mind. You must
try to be content with what you have, and to make the best of it. If you
had the moon you wouldn't be any happier.' Then you lie awake half the
night repining because the last post has brought a letter to the effect
that 'the Board cannot entertain your application for,' etc. You say the
two cases are not alike. They are not. Your child has never heard of
Epictetus. On the other hand, justice _is_ the moon. At your age you
surely know that. 'But the Directors _ought_ to have granted my
application,' you insist. Exactly! I agree. But we are not in a universe
of _oughts_. You have a special apparatus within you for dealing with a
universe where _oughts_ are flagrantly disregarded. And you are not
using it. You are lying awake, keeping your wife awake, injuring your
health, injuring hers, losing your dignity and your cheerfulness. Why?
Because you think that these antics and performances will influence the
Board? Because you think that they will put you into a better condition
for dealing with your environment to-morrow? Not a bit. Simply because
the machine is at fault.

In certain cases we do make use of our machines (as well as their sad
condition of neglect will allow), but in other cases we behave in an
extraordinarily irrational manner. Thus if we sally out and get caught
in a heavy shower we do not, unless very far gone in foolishness, sit
down and curse the weather. We put up our umbrella, if we have one, and
if not we hurry home. We may grumble, but it is not serious grumbling;
we accept the shower as a fact of the universe, and control ourselves.
Thus also, if by a sudden catastrophe we lose somebody who is important
to us, we grieve, but we control ourselves, recognising one of those
hazards of destiny from which not even millionaires are exempt. And the
result on our Ego is usually to improve it in essential respects. But
there are other strokes of destiny, other facts of the universe,
against which we protest as a child protests when deprived of the moon.

Take the case of an individual with an imperfect idea of honesty. Now,
that individual is the consequence of his father and mother and his
environment, and his father and mother of theirs, and so backwards to
the single-celled protoplasm. That individual is a result of the cosmic
order, the inevitable product of cause and effect. We know that. We must
admit that he is just as much a fact of the universe as a shower of rain
or a storm at