He accepted every fact, circumstance and experience of life, and counted it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones. He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things, how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates anticipating Emerson's Essay on Compensation. Everything is bought with a price--all things are of equal value--no one can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you get the compensation by increase in mental growth. However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said, would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get nothing. Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent. * * * * * The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates. For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens. Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom will die with them.