All life is growth, and growth is the making actual of what is potential, the incarnation in the material form and external behavior of inner and hidden possibilities. The good life is the more abundant life, the life in which the potentialities of an individual or of a society are made as rich and as numerous as possible and then realized with maximum effectiveness. The problem of ethics is not, as tradition conceives it, a problem of how to conform to taboos and commandments, be they natural or social or even divine. It is simply the problem of how to make the most of one’s life. Whatever the abilities or disabilities with which nature has endowed us at birth; and whatever the opportunities or limitations which environment may chance to impose, it is within the free power of each of us to make the most or the least of what his destiny offers.
Wm. Pepperell Montague
