ody dreams of questioning it.
Practical business has been substituted for war as the purpose of
existence.

Is this modern ideal to survive throughout the future? I think not.
While all other things undergo continuous change, it is impossible that
ideals should remain fixed. The ancient ideal was appropriate to the
ages of conquest by man over man and spread of the strongest races. The
modern ideal is appropriate to ages in which conquest of the earth and
subjection of the powers of Nature to human use is the predominant need.
But hereafter, when both these ends have in the main been achieved, the
ideal formed will probably differ considerably from the present one. May
we not foresee the nature of the difference? I think we may.

Some twenty years ago, a good friend of mine and a good friend of yours,
too, though you never saw him, John Stuart Mill, delivered at St.
Andrew's an inaugural address on the occasion of his appointment to the
Lord Rectorship. It contained much to be admired, as did all he wrote;
there ran through it, however, the tacit assumption that life is for
learning and working. I felt at the time that I should have liked to
take up the opposite thesis. I should have liked to contend that life is
not for learning nor is life for working, but learning and working are
for life. The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct
under all circumstances as shall make living complete--all other uses of
knowledge are secondary. It scarcely needs saying that the primary use
of work is that of supplying the materials and aids to living
completely; and that any other uses of work are secondary. But in men's
conceptions the secondary has in great measure usurped the place of the
primary.

The apostle of culture, as culture is commonly conceived, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, makes little or no reference to the fact that the first use of
knowledge is the right ordering of all actions; and Mr. Carlyle, who is
a good exponent of current ideas about work, insists on its virtues for
quite other reasons than that it achieves sustentation. We may trace
everywhere in human affairs a tendency to transform the means into the
end. All see that the miser does this when making the accumulation of
money his sole satisfaction; he forgets that money is of value only to
purchase satisfactions. But it is less commonly seen that the like is
true of the work by which the money is accumulated--that industry, too,
bodily or mental,