Chapter VI

Each individual must define happiness for himself or herself. For my part, I rule out practically all the dictionary definitions. In most dictionaries you will find that the principal meaning attached to the word is ‘good fortune’ or ‘prosperity.’ Which is notoriously absurd. Then come such definitions as ‘a state of well-being characterised by relative permanence, by dominantly agreeable emotion ... and by a natural desire for its continuation.’ This last is from Webster, and it is very clever. Yet I will have none of it, unless I am allowed to define the word ‘well-being’ in my own way.

For me, an individual cannot be in a state of well-being if any of his faculties are permanently idle through any fault of his own. The full utilisation of all the faculties seems to me to be the foundation of well-being. But I doubt if a full utilisation of all the faculties necessarily involves the idea of good fortune, or prosperity, or tranquillity, or contentedness with one’s lot, or even a ‘dominantly agreeable emotion’; very often it rather involves the contrary.

In my view happiness includes chiefly the idea of ‘satisfaction after full honest effort.’ Everybody is guilty of mistakes and of serious mistakes, and the contemplation of these mistakes must darken, be it ever so little, the last years of existence. But it need not be fatal to a general satisfaction. Men and women may in the end be forced to admit: ‘I made a fool of myself,’ and still be fairly happy. But no one can possibly be satisfied, and therefore no one can in my sense be happy, who feels that in some paramount affair he has failed to take up the challenge of life. For a voice within him, which none else can hear, but which he cannot choke, will constantly be murmuring:

‘You lacked courage. You hadn’t the pluck. You ran away.’

And it is happier to be unhappy in the ordinary sense all one’s life than to have to listen at the end to that dreadful interior verdict.

SOME AXIOMS ABOUT WAR-WORK

SOME AXIOMS ABOUT WAR-WORK