ABSTRACT
I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady killer as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tonepoet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to be a man. But to make one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed.
