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, is but a means, and that it is as irrational to pursue it to the exclusion of that complete living it subserves as it is for the miser to accumulate money and make no use of it.  Hereafter when this age of active material progress has yielded mankind its benefits there will, I think, come a better adjustment of labor and enjoyment.  Among reasons for thinking this there is the reason that the processes of evolution throughout the world at large bring an increasing surplus of energies that are not absorbed in fulfilling material needs and point to a still larger surplus for humanity of the future.  And there are other reasons which I must pass over.  In brief, I may say that we have had somewhat too much of the “gospel of work.”  It is time to preach the gospel of relaxation.