says the princess in Tasso; and this appears to express a general principle. Each sex represents to the other a wide range of fresh and vital experience inaccessible alone. Thus the woman usually stands for a richer and more open emotional life, the man for a stronger mental grasp, for control and synthesis. Alfred without Laura feels dull, narrow, and coarse, while Laura on her part feels selfish and hysterical. Again, sympathy is selective, and thus illustrates a phase of the vital process more talked about at present than any other. To go out into the life of other people takes energy, as everyone may see in his own experience; and since energy is limited and requires some special stimulus to evoke it, sympathy becomes active only when our imaginations are reaching out after something we admire or love, or in some way feel the need to understand and make our own. A healthy mind, at least, does not spend much energy on things that do not, in some way, contribute to its development: ideas and persons that lie wholly aside from the direction of its growth, or from which it has absorbed all they have to give, necessarily lack interest for it and so fail to awaken sympathy. An incontinent response to every suggestion offered indicates the breaking down of that power of inhibition or refusal that is our natural defence against the reception of material we cannot digest, and looks toward weakness, instability, and mental decay. So with persons from whom we have nothing to gain, in any sense, whom we do not admire, or love, or fear, or hate, and who do not even interest us as psychological problems or objects of charity, we can have no sympathy except of the most superficial and fleeting sort. I do not overlook the fact that a large class of people suffer a loss of human breadth and power by falling into a narrow and exclusive habit of mind; but at the same time personality is nothing unless it has character, individuality, a distinctive line of growth, and to have this is to have a principle of rejection as well as reception in sympathy. Social development as a whole, and every act of sympathy as a part of that development, is guided and stimulated in its selective growth by feeling. The outgoing of the mind into the thought of another is always, it would seem, an excursion in search of the congenial; not necessarily of the pleasant, in the ordinary sense, but of that which is fitting or congruous with our actual state of feeling. Thus we would not call Carlyle or the Book of Job pleasant exactly, yet we have moods in which these writers, however lacking in amenity, seem harmonious and attractive.