In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, who are a human being, the question to be or not to be is the question to think or not to think. A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. Value is that which one acts to gain and keep, virtue is the action by which one gains and keeps it.
Value presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative.
Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only the concept of Life that makes the concept of Value possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it.