VII
The delusion that men, while addicting themselves to their desires and regarding this life of desire as good, can nevertheless lead a good, useful, just, and loving life, is so astonishing that men of later generations will, I should think, simply fail to understand what the men of our time meant by the words "good life," when they said that the gluttons, the effeminate, lustful sluggards of our wealthy classes led good lives. Indeed, one need only put aside, for a time, the customary view of the life of our wealthy classes, and look at it,—I do not say from the Christian point of view, but from the heathen standpoint of common justice, in order to be convinced that, living amidst the violation of the plainest laws of justice or fairness, such as even children in their games think it wrong to violate, we, men of the wealthy classes, have no right even to talk about a good life.
Any man of our society who would,—I. do not say begin a good life, but even begin to make some little approach toward it, must first of all cease to lead a bad life, must begin to destroy those conditions of an evil life with which he finds himself surrounded.
How often one hears, as an excuse for not reforming our lives, the argument, that any act which is contrary to the usual mode of life would be unnatural, ludicrous,—would look like a desire to show off and would therefore not be a good action. This argument seems framed expressly to prevent people from ever changing their evil lives. If all our life were good, just, kind, then and only then would an action in conformity with the usual mode of life be good. If one half of our life were good and the other half bad, then there would be as much chance of an action out of conformity with the usual mode of life being good as of its being bad. But when life is altogether bad, and irregular, as is the case in our upper classes, then a man cannot perform one good action without disturb-
