ticipation and memory which prolong any enjoyment, and of
these anticipation is the more effective. The knowledge that one is at
a certain time to sail for a foreign tour confers before the sailing
an enjoyment which is often more than a foretaste. It often rivals the
pleasure that is consciously taken in the trip itself. A man may be
happy for years in the prospect of a business success or a prospect of
election to a public office, and many years of hard labor in
scientific investigation may be illuminated by the expectation of the
ultimate discovery and its consequences. There is a good reason why
even an average man, as well as a wise one, will wish to distribute
his expenditures over the different periods of his life, and to give a
preference to the future whenever that is necessary in order to enable
him to hold through his earlier years the comfortable assurance that
his later ones are well provided for.

[Illustration]

If the line _AB_ represents by its distance above _CD_ a fixed
standard of living during a period of ten years, the highly rational
man will prefer to take something from the enjoyments of the first
five and bestow them on the second five. The consciousness of
improvement, of the fact that every year will bring a new enjoyment
never before experienced, makes the whole life brighter than it could
be with any other disposition of the available means of pleasure. The
man's standard of living during the whole ten-year period will be
represented by the rising dotted line _EF_.

_The Effect of Robbing the Future._--If a man pursued the opposite
course, of taking something from the future to add to the
desirableness of the present, thus establishing a falling standard of
living, he would have to relinquish every year something to which he
was accustomed, which would cause him a keen pain. The very excessive
gains of the present would thus become sources of unhappiness at a
later period, while the anticipation of the later unhappinesses would
throw a shadow over the present. The men who in spite of all this live
recklessly and waste their present substance do so, not so much
because they undervalue so much of the future as falls within their
purview, as because they are so extremely short-sighted that over
nearly all of the future they have practically no vision at all.

_The Actual Conduct of a very Reasonable Man._--The real fact in the
case of a reasonable man is represented by the following figure