The thought that needs emphasis in this connection is that, while production and consumption are separable in thought and distinguishable in practice, they are not opposed in their ultimate purpose. The highest fruits of production are in the lessons of sacrifice and discipline, and in its opportunities for experience and self-expression. The best result of the consumption of wealth is not the gratification of appetite, but the strengthening of the spiritual forces within men. The world is to rise to a higher social stage not by banishing labor and by multiplying sensual enjoyments of the commoner sort. Wealth, even in an economic view, is not the end of life, but merely the means to its realization.
Variety and harmony in the choice of goods
4. Enjoyment is increased by a proper variety and harmony of goods. As the old kinds of goods increase in amount and fall in value, there must be a substitution of new goods. An element added to the dress or to the diet heightens greatly the total gratification. The result is a unit. Think of a dinner without butter, or a cranberry-pie without sugar, or a dress-suit without a linen collar. Certain combinations are essential to the requirements of developed taste and present a problem of complementary goods. Combinations of complementary goods enhance the enjoyment; inharmonious combinations decrease it. That certain things "go together" is a fact that rests often in the nature of things. Complementary colors please the eye; well-seasoned dishes please the palate.
Again, the harmony of goods is affected by the special nature of the occupation. A farmer with his out-of-door life can use tobacco with far less danger than the sedentary worker. A piano player cannot be a base-ball player: the one requires soft and supple hands, the other hard and callous ones. The young man must give up the piano or the game, or play both badly. The harmony may rest on a still more complex social adjustment. The loss to the man whose life is in the main on a higher plane is greater if he descends occasionally to a lower. A ditch-digger, looking at the question short-sightedly, may deem "a good drunk" a very desirable form of enjoyment. But a brain-worker, whose joy as well as efficiency depends on the clearness of his intellectual processes, must see that in his case the perils and the costs are much greater.
Unity of choice in happiness and in character
Wise consumption depends not alone on physical pleasures, but on the spiritual unity of the uses made of goods. Happiness and character are akin in the qualities of simplicity and unity. Happiness, so far as it depends on wealth, is a harmony of gratifications. Character is a harmony of actions, a group of complementary deeds. There can be no harmony, without a central, simple, guiding principle. The wise and moral use of goods and the economic use of them are therefore for the individual essentially the same. Life is a unity. The results of the choice of goods are reflected in the health, intelligence, happiness, morality, and progress of society. It is vain for the economist to ignore the ultimate relations between economic choice and morality; it is folly for the moralist to ignore the economic bases of right and wrong in human conduct.