How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

because he knows that any infraction of the household laws will not only bring down the wrath of his father, but will also make him forfeit the tender caresses of his mother. At school it is much more difficult to maintain the centre of attention when thirty other children demand a share of the teacher’s good graces. We may say in passing that Edgar was very well behaved in class until an unthinking teacher punished him once for a misdeed he had not really committed. From that time he felt that the teacher was his natural enemy, and used every malicious trick to revenge himself known to an active boy of eleven, and at the same time gain the centre of attention he so badly desired and valued as the fundamental premise of his cooperation. It paid to be good at home—and it paid equally to be bad in school. Have you not known men who were the most charming of good fellows in their clubs or offices, only to become tyrants the moment they came home ? Have you not seen women who praised their husbands lavishly when visiting their friends, but nagged those same husbands bitterly in the privacy of their own bedrooms ? These sudden and often quite contrasting character traits which we sometimes see men and women exhibiting do not belie the unity of the conduct pattern, nor do they indicate that our personality goal changes with the four winds. We use different tools, logically, when we cope with different environments. This also accounts for the apparent changes in mood and emotion to which most individuals are subject. When we approach our goal successfully we are elated and happy and good humoured. When we sense an imminent defeat our mood changes to depression, “ blues,” tears, anger or rage, according to our pattern. No matter what the variations in conduct, in behaviour, in mood or in emotion, the goal of the personality remains a fixed fiction which we approach now aggressively, now hesitatingly, now with laughter, and now with tears, as the situation demands. Although we have demonstrated our general thesis of the purposiveness of all character traits, it may serve to