But men cannot finely pioneer nor nobly adventure until after they have learned certain lessons in life. Men must learn to be self-reveringly independent, which implies not the aloofness of solitude but the aloneness when necessary of moral and spiritual self-reliance. Man must learn to live his own life. There is no greater danger in our time than that a man shall submit to the tyranny of the crowd. A man need not be remote from nor yet alien to the world and yet he may live his own life and live within himself. We suffer ourselves to come under the domination of mob-feeling and mob-thinking, such as it is, because we have not learned the art of shutting ourselves away at times from the world. We seem never to dare to be alone because, though we know it not, we would fain avoid facing life’s problems. We must understand, too, that, if the problems of our own life are to be met and solved, these things cannot be done vicariously. Not parents nor teachers nor ministers can solve those pressing problems of our inner life with which a man can cope effectively only amid the solitude of his inmost life. Until you have learned the art of separating yourself for some time in every day from the multitude, you will not learn how to think out and think through life’s problems. You will not even know that there are problems to be resolved. But while life is to be lived in the spirit of self-reverence and self-reliance, life’s great questions cannot be faced aright unless they be faced selflessly. Life is not to be egocentric but heterocentric. The question that a man must put is not what is he going to get out of life, how can he get the most out of life, but how can he put the most and the best into life. Life is not to be interpreted in terms of self, of individual gain, of personal advantage. If it be possible to differentiate between two classes in the world, these classes are respectively made up of the men who read life in the language of privilege and advantage and the men who interpret life in the terms of duty and obligation and responsibility. The selfless are the only beings who know how to live, who have learned and mastered the art of life. It is always possible to draw the distinction between the man who lives for himself, for what he can get out of life, for the enhancement of his own fame, for the enlargement of his own power, and the man who puts himself second, who lives for the good of others, who lives for the good, who is capable of denying self. The noblest of men and women are they who prescribe life to self in terms of duty to the world.