Another superfluity is the excessive going to meetings. A man who is much devoted to such gatherings can scarcely find time for serious work. Indeed, it is not necessary for him to do independent work; for he has substituted for his own judgment the judgment of the crowd, and the crowd carries him on its shoulders. A great waste of time occurs, further, among one class of people at the present time, through a pretended devotion to art. I do not refer to art practised by oneself, but to art as passively accepted; and I should perhaps make exception in what I say, of the art of music. In other forms of art many persons permit those impulses which should have stirred them to idealism, and to responsiveness toward the beautiful, to evaporate in æsthetic satisfactions. Many women, to speak frankly, are educated to acquire mere artistic appreciation; and they cannot, without severe struggles and against great hindrances, find the way back from this mood to any profitable and spiritually satisfying work. Another superfluity is the devotion to social duties and the whole purposeless system of making “calls.” These habits are the mere shadows of genuine friendship, and of the intellectual stimulus through personal intercourse which they were originally intended to express. I need not speak of superfluous amusements. The theatre, for instance, to accomplish its legitimate aim needs so fundamental a reform that there would be really nothing left of its present methods. Finally, and of quite another category among the elements of culture in our time, I may name as superfluous the superficial and popular products of materialism, and with these the debasing French novels and dramas of the day. People of the educated class in our time, and especially people of the academic circle, ought to have the courage to say of such literature: “We know nothing about it.” Then perhaps one might have time to read something each day which was serious and educative; something that tended to strengthen the mind and to bring one into real contact with the intellectual movement of the age.