Actually, of course, the social values of even primarily
personal ideals are impossible to overlook, and often bulk larger than
the merely personal values. This whole side of the matter will be left
for convenience, however, to the following chapter.
Epicureanism vs. Puritanism.
Personal ideals have swung historically between two magnets, richness
and purity, self-expression and self-repression, indulgence and
asceticism. The crux of the individual's problem is the question how
much repression is necessary; and man's answer has wavered somewhere
between these extremes, which we may designate by the names of their
best-known exemplars, Epicureanism and Puritanism. Many differences
in degree or detail there have been, of course, in the various historic
embodiments of these ideals; but for the sake of making clear the
fundamental contrast we may neglect these individual divergences and
group together those on the one hand who have called men to a fuller,
completer life and those who have summoned them to an austerer and
purer life, free from taint of sin and regret. We shall then put in
the first group such well-known seers and poets as Epicurus, Lucretius,
Horace, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman; we shall
think of the Greek gods, of the Renaissance artists, the English
cavaliers. We shall think of the motto, "Carpe diem," and "Gather ye
rosebuds while ye may"; and perhaps of Stevenson's
"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all
be as happy as kings.
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