man unteachable and incapable of melioration, for it leads him to think himself already sufficiently perfect.

Some men of great character have had this self-pride in an inordinate degree, but the greatest minds have been humble and willing to receive instruction from any true source. Emerson says: 66 Every man I meet is my master in some point and can instruct me therein;" this attitude renders one receptive to all the good and wisdom one meets, and is an important condition of self-improvement.

The rude experience which contact with the world brings a man, usually rubs down the salient angularities of his own importance and subdues his conceit to the point of its benefits. In the formation of a virtuous character, a man must constantly steer between the Scylla of his virtues in exaggeration, and the Charybdis of their allied vices, but he must not let this necessity paralyze him.

The activity of brain, the effort to do and not to wrap one's talent in a napkin and bury it, but to put it out to usury, has been a feature of all great men.

"No matter how full a reservoir of MAXIMS one may possess and no matter how good one's SENTIMENTS may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to ACT, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for

the better. With men's good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. A "character," as J. S. Mills says, "is a completely fashioned will;" and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm, prompt and definite way in all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectually ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions take place, and the brain grows to their use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

"There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming by his eloquence all the mothers of France to follow nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is a classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated good, he practically ignores some actual case among the squalid "other particulars" among which that same

good lurks disguised, treads straight in Rousseau's path. All good is disguised by the vulgarity of its concomitants in this workaday world; but woe to him who can recognize them only when he thinks of them in their own pure and abstract form.

"The habit of excessive novel reading and theatre going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be never to suffer oneself to have an emotion without expressing it afterward in SOME active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world-speaking genially to one's grandmother, or giving up one's seat in a horse car, if nothing more heroic offers-but let it not fail to take place.

"Just as we let our emotions evaporate they get in a way of evaporating, so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it, the effort-making capacity will be gone."1

Neither good will, fine emotions nor right

'Prof. William James: "Psychology,” p. 147.

feeling avail unless a man realizes on them, and this realization has been a mark of all the great characters to whom the world has given recognition.

X

CULTURE

BACON'S oft quoted saying that "Knowledge is power" has been usually interpreted as meaning that knowledge is a beneficent power. It may be a power for good, and it may be as surely a power for evil, for there is no connection between perfect familiarity with facts and an appreciation of the great principles of life. Knowledge of what is good and what is evil avails nothing unless supported by the wisdom to follow the one and to avoid the other. Hux

ley says: "If I am a knave or a fool, teaching

me to write and read won't make me less of either the one or the other, unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to wise and good purposes." But add wisdom and moral apprehension to the mental faculties, and we have the power of virtue and the beginning of culture.

That education does not culminate in virtue is sadly exemplified by the moral standard of some of the best educated people, lawyers, physicians, preachers, different professions, whose members we find in the daily records of rascality, and above all the politicians, whose