But men of more timid temperament prefer to devote their attention to the other factor (E - W), because herein lies the danger, not merely of no happiness (when G = 0), but of unhappiness, for G becomes a minus quantity when W is greater than E. They strive rather to reduce W, the unpleasant part of life, than to increase E, the pleasant. To avoid risks, to curb ambition, to limit desires, to curtail expenditure, to seek contentment rather than delight—this is the way of the simple life and leads to Hut-happiness (Hüttenglück). This may indeed attain the same result, give an equal value for G, but the happiness so reached is very different in kind, though equivalent in degree, to that for which strive men of the type of Napoleon, Edison, and Roosevelt. The search for happiness by limitation instead of expansion leads at its extreme to stoicism, to asceticism, to nirvana, to the state of mind of Diogenes, who threw away his sole utensil, the cup, when he saw a man drink out of his hand.
Many moralists before Ostwald have attempted to put this idea into semi-mathematical form, generally with the object of advising the seeker after happiness to take the lower and smoother road. Carlyle says in "Sartor Resartus":
"The Fraction of Life can be increased in value, not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world at thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write 'It is only with Renunciation that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.'" James, in his "Principles of Psychology", expresses it as follows:
Success
Self-esteem = —————
Pretensions.
That is, our self-esteem is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. And he suggests that some Bostonians "would be happier men and women to-day if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance"?
William Winter puts the thought in rhyme: