unless to those who can guard them." Our feeling in this respect is not likely to be too delicate. Like the Christ in Revelation, we are to stand at the door of the heart only to knock. We may well cultivate the reverence which Goethe makes the essence of religion -reverence for that which is above us, for that which is beside us, for that which is beneath us. After all, the only really sacred thing is a person, and the sacredness of all places and things is borrowed from persons. The teaching of Christ has as a foundation - stone such a reverence for personality-reverence for man as man because each is a child of God.

Moreover, the truest development in civilization is to be seen only in this deepening sense of the sacredness of the person. There is no higher test of the civilization of any community or nation. A nation's treatment, thus, of its women and children and dependents, is the surest measure of its real progress. Every step in the moral progress of the race has been a step into a growing reverence for personality. And the depth of this respect is thus a delicate measure of one's own attainment. Reverence for another, therefore, is

1 The Soul of the Christian, p. 75.

essential to us, as well as to the other. "He who considers himself the Lord of others," said Fichte, "is himself a slave." The contemptuous spirit is the working of death in us. What one reckons the value of his own self to be, what his own claim on life isthis is necessarily his standard for the respect due to others. Reverence for personality is thus a kind of guide for love itself. The meaning of the Golden Rule to any man depends on how much the self means to him. The most searching questions a man can put to himself, therefore, are just these: How deep and sacred a thing to me is a person? How significant is friendship?

II. THE POWER OF PERSONAL ASSOCIATION

This emphasis on the concrete and the personal also suggests a second great means to happiness, to character, and to influencepersonal association.

Influence of Imitation.-The enormous influence of imitation, in the development of the individual, upon which, as we have seen, both Baldwin and Royce lay such emphasis, points at once to the primary importance of personal association. And it holds for the

entire range of human activities, even the purely intellectual. Thus Sully points out, for example: "A child will profit more by daily companionship with an acute observer, be he teacher or playfellow, than by all systematic attempts to train the senses."1 "The deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in another," James says. "The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort." One of the most valuable and promising recent gains in the educational life of the country is the tendency to make much more of the distinctly social possibilities of our public schools. We can spare nowhere the power of personal association.

One Must Be Won to Character.—Again, just because character is what it is, and must have liberty as a condition, its great means, for ourselves and others, cannot be force, precept, or command, but the winning to a free choice to an inner response. One must be attracted toward it. For it can come only of our own will. And attraction is precisely what occurs in personal association. Similarly, since happiness cannot be commanded, but comes only on conditions which are inner even more than outer, these conditions are 1 Op. cit., p. 214.

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likely to be preeminently personal. And of influence, it is manifestly true that its very possibility depends upon the fact that we are members one of another; and one's influence, therefore, will count in direct proportion as the laws of personal association are carefully observed.

We Are Made for Personal Relations.-But it is chiefly just because we are personal and made for personal relations that we may be sure that the chief means to character and happiness and influence is personal association. Character is caught, not taught, and happiness and influence have their highest source in friendship. This emphasis upon the fact that character comes rather by contagion than by teaching, is, of course, not intended to deny the moral value of insight, for this is involved in the very unity of the mind, already dwelt upon.' But, as Du Bois says, here "our need is less a matter of direct teaching and preaching than of atmospheric influence-example, suggestion, pure speech, gentle manner, sweet temper, strong handling, firm stepping in virtue."" Indeed, the child rather resents direct moralizing; and

Cf. Paulsen, A System of Ethics, pp. 26, 40, 58, etc.

The Gatural Way, p. 137.

the insistence on drawing the moral may even distinctly lessen the power of story or example; not chiefly, I think, because moralizing is abstract, but because it seems to press in too closely and unwarrantably on the child's inner personality.1

One Cannot Learn to Love Alone.-Moreover, if love is the all-inclusive virtue, the highest happiness, and the highest sphere of influence, then character and happiness and influence, alike, must come chiefly in association. One cannot learn to love alone. We need, for our very life, much common democratic association with men. It is the business of life to learn to fulfil wisely and faithfully the common personal relations of life, and we shall not learn this in a vacuum." This, some one has nobly said, "is the highest and richest education of a human nature- not an instruction, not a commandment, but a friend."

Personal Association the Greatest Means. Leaving to one side, now, the special consideration of happiness and influencethough inferences as to both will be continually implied-let us note that, besides work, and more than work, personal associa

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1 Cf. King, Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 191 ff. Cf. King, Op. cit., pp. 112 ff.