the hobby (call it!) of common-sense daily living will act as an
automatic test of any ambition. If an ambition survives and flourishes
on the top of that daily cultivation of the machine, then the owner of
the ambition may be sure that it is a genuine and an invincible
ambition, and he may pursue it in full faith; his developed care for the
present will prevent him from making his ambition an altar on which the
whole of the present is to be offered up.

I shall be told that I want to do away with ambition, and that ambition
is the great motive-power of existence, and that therefore I am an enemy
of society and the truth is not in me. But I do not want to do away with
ambition. What I say is that current ambitions usually result in
disappointment, that they usually mean the complete distortion of a
life. This is an incontestable fact, and the reason of it is that
ambitions are chosen either without knowledge of their real value or
without knowledge of what they will cost. A disciplined brain will at
once show the unnecessariness of most ambitions, and will ensure that
the remainder shall be conducted with reason. It will also convince its
possessor that the ambition to live strictly according to the highest
common sense during the next twenty-four hours is an ambition that needs
a lot of beating.




XV

L.S.D.