another. What sense of reality can there be for such minds, what truth, what reverence, what enthusiasm, or what purpose? Mighty purposes are born of mighty convictions, and not otherwise. No wonder that Charles Wagner rings out over the youth of France: "Enough of negations, enough, above all, of jugglers and poseurs! Give us men of faith and action, of love and hate, with a clear seeing eye, a breast that throbs, and a vigorous arm; men who, emancipated from idle fancies and the empty din of words, are silent, and putting their hands to the plow, drive, as their witness, a straight furrow in the field of life."1

Yet, it is probable that just here lies the danger of the highly educated man. The very breadth of view which his education has brought, the capacity to see many aspects of a matter, his cultivated emphasis on the many-sidedness of truth-all tend to "oversophistication." A fatal facility in taking any point of view or of defending any proposition, which is one of the natural products of his education, carries with it the danger of breaking down all real conviction. And so it is quite possible for a man to graduate 1 Charles Wagner, Youth, p. 67.

from college with high honors, but positively less fitted for any valuable and effective work in life than if he had never seen college doors.

Nothing can replace in value the great fundamental convictions. And yet it is a mistaken inference to make breadth of view a denial of all depth of view-to make many-sidedness of truth a reason for giving up truth. Breadth and tolerance are not indifferentism. Truth is many-sided; but truth comes not through the silence of all, but by each declaring earnestly and honestly his best. In no other way can progress in truth be brought about. Each thinker, therefore, recognizes that his own view must be partial, but he puts it forth with all energy and earnestness, for it is the truth for which it is given him to stand. He expects its partial character to be corrected by conflict with the thought of other equally earnest and honest thinkers.

A closely connected danger is that of making insights or feeling take the place of doing. The possession of right theories of conduct, carefully thought out, or of kindly emotions, is often assumed to insure right conduct, and as often becomes a snare to their possessor. Knowing the truth is not

1

doing the truth. "Especially," says Stanley Hall, "wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peacefully beside bad discarded habits, moral weakness is directly cultivated." There are temperaments naturally gifted with clear insight and delicately sensitive to the bearings of conduct, who can speak unerringly concerning the temptations, dangers, and aids of living, but whose lives seem none the better. DeQuincy records that this is precisely the state of the opiumeater. Such a character is likely to develop special weakness of will, for there is positive injury in clear insights that are not obeyed; the whole character is cankered by this persistent failure to live according to one's best light, and becomes hollow and hypocritical. The problem of life cannot be solved on paper. It is just here that peculiar danger besets those whose business it is to think and speak much along the lines of the moral and the religious life. They easily persuade themselves that having thought and felt and spoken so clearly of the right life, they may rest assured that right conduct will follow as a matter of course. There is danger, at least, that the proverb which Paulsen 1 Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. II, p. 8.

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quotes shall prove true: "The man who rings the bell cannot march in the procession." 1

Among the intellectual

hindrances to

character, there should be named one special effect of intellectual vagueness. It is intellectual vagueness, I believe, which gives the chief danger to many forms of temptation. And the spiritual leader needs to see this both for himself and for others. The temptations are alluring only so long as their real implications are allowed to remain vague in the mind. Let them be fully thought, and their power is gone. They will not bear investigation. They have only the abnormal power of what psychology calls the "insistent ideas" of the insane, that continually impel one to some action that he may even abhor to do.

It is doubtless not advice to be followed in our weaker moods; but sometimes the very best cure for these insistent temptations is no longer to seek simply to evade their thought, but to turn a square look at them. In some clear, high moment of vision, at a time when one is at his best, let him calmly and clearly face the facts as to these

1 Cf. A System of Ethics, pp. 211-214.

things which he has counted his greatest allurements. Let him turn a telescope on the Sirens and the Lorelei - the telescope of a little clear thinking. They are not SO attractive as he has thought; their beauty is false and painted; their smile, a leer. It may not be wholly unwise even to take the cotton out of one's ears, and from one's height of vantage to listen for a moment with thoughtful attention to the song of these sirens. A man finds the song coarser than he had thought, and the voices too harsh and too cruel to charm. No! One does not wish to let himself go into what are euphemistically called "great passions" of body or mind.

It is a sobering reflection that Lotze gives us, when he says: "We too easily forget that much which looks extremely well in a picture and has a striking effect in poetry, would make us heartily ashamed of our prepossession if we were to see it, not at a single favorable moment but in the ordinary course of life, in connection with all its manifold results. The charm of what is strange and full of characteristic expression and onesided originality, is so great that it leads every one to be sometimes unjust toward