therefore, is not that of a mere heavy tug of the will. Self-control depends on attention, and attention has its chief support in strong and many-sided interest. This means that the great secret of all living is the persistent staying in the presence of the best-the great facts, the great truths, the great personalities, the one great Person, Christ. We come into the absorbing, passionate, and deepening interest in all things of value only so, and it is this persistent, passionate interest in the best that determines, ultimately, our significance and efficiency in life.

III. OBJECTIVITY A PRIME CONDITION OF CHARACTER, AND HAPPINESS, AND INFLUENCE

This brings us at once to a third great practical inference from psychology's emphasis on will and action. If we are made for action, and no experience is normally completed until it issues in action, then the normal mood, it would seem, must be the mood of activity, of work, not of passivity, of brooding objectivity, not subjectivity or introspection.

No Activity Is at Its Best When the Attention Is Centered on the Self.-One must lose himself

in the object. Many illustrations will occur to one. One will best hit the mark when he is thinking of it, not of how he is performing the action. The fundamental condition in art-appreciation, Schopenhauer insists, is that one lose himself in the art-object. One of the most interesting things at the Dresden Gallery, after seeing Raphael's great picture of the Sistine Madonna oneself, is watching others see it. It is so evident that practically all come to the picture, saying to themselves: "This is one of the greatest pictures in the world; am I now having the appropriate emotions in the presence of this great picture?" And so long as one is wondering if he is having the appropriate emotions, the picture itself gets no fair chance at one. So, too, one can never be at his best in the company of those with whom he feels himself still on probation. Only those friends see one's best with whom one can quite forget himself in his theme. Health, itself, suffers when one thinks too much about it. Health, rather, requires something of interest to which one can turn and forget himself. One may, perhaps, sum up this need of the objective mood in the immortal rhyme that Mrs. Wiggin has made familiar to us:

M

"The centipede was happy quite,

Until the frog for fun,

Said 'Pray, which leg comes after which?'
Which wrought his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run."

It is true of the two best things in the world-happiness and character-for the very reason that both are conditions of the self, that they are best found by not seeking them directly. And Bradley's sneer-sharp as it is

-at John Stuart Mill for holding to a summum bonum that could only be hit by not aiming at it, was itself beside the mark. How often our elaborate preparations for a good time quite fail; and how often, on the other hand, our good time comes on us unawares; but when we study its conditions and think we have discovered its secret, the repetition soon undeceives us. Both the inveterate pleasure-seeker, and many of those most in earnest for character have made the same mistake here-they concentrate their attention too much upon themselves. Both character and happiness require objectivity.

There are two contrasted theories of growth in character, it has been pointed outone, "the realism of self-development "—the

other, "the idealism of work." The one looks at everything to discover its bearing on the development of self; the other loses itself in a great work. The theory of self-development as the great end of life, Lotze has said, is fundamentally deficient in submission and self-sacrifice; and it assuredly cannot escape a certain repulsiveness even when adopted in great earnestness by a man of such will and genius as Goethe. One may seek his moral and spiritual salvation in real selfishness. But more than this is true. If action is of central importance, the theory is wrongly based psychologically. One cannot win either the highest character or the largest happiness, with self so continually in mind. It is not even enough to take on abundance of work as moral exercise or discipline, or as a help to happiness, so long as self remains continually in mind. We need not only work, but the mood of work; not only reaction on an object, but objectivity; the work must be great enough and pressing enough for us to lose ourselves in it. The action itself reaches its perfection only so; and that means that thought and purpose and feeling, also, come to their perfection only so. Selfishness—even of the most exalted type-and introspection,

in their very nature, spoil the mocd of work, and make impossible the best attainment in character and the highest happiness.

One other consideration leads to the same insistence upon objectivity as an essential condition of both character and happiness. Love is both the all-inclusive virtue, and the greatest source of happiness. Neither character, then, nor happiness can be selfcentered; for genuine love lives in its object, forgets itself in that, is wholly objective. Its mood, therefore, is that of the most perfect work. "By throwing their whole nature into the interests of others," Lecky justly says, "men most effectually escape the melancholy of introspection; the horizon of life is enlarged; the development of the moral and sympathetic feelings chases egotistic cares." 1

It is true that this line of thought tends to reverse much of ordinary thought as to the predominant place of introspection and self-examination in the moral and religious life; and yet, there seems ample psychological ground for insisting that the prevailing mood must be objective. Introspection has its undoubted place, but it is a much more limited place than is ordinarily recognized. 1 Op. cit., p. 34.