Besides whatever other conditions, time is necessary to bring the best things to maturity, and to imagine that excellence demands less than lifelong work, is to mistake. It is by the patient observation of the infinitesimal that science has done its best work; and it is only by unwearying attention to the thousand little things of life that we may hope to make some approach to moral and intellectual perfection. He who works with joy and cheerfulness in the field which himself has found and chosen, will acquire knowledge and skill, and his labor will be transformed into increase and newness of life. We gain a clear view of things only when we set them apart from ourselves, and contemplate them simply as objects of thought. To see them aright we must be free from emotion and behold them in the cold air of the intellect. To look on them as in some way bound up with our personal good or evil, is to have the vision blurred. Study in the spirit of an investigator, who has no other than a scientific interest in what he sets himself to examine. The wise physician is wholly intent upon making a correct diagnosis, though the patient be his mother. What gain would self-delusion bring him or her he loves? Things are what they are, and it is our business to know them. Observe and hold thy judgment in suspense until patient looking shall have made truth so plain that to pass judgment is superfluous. The aim of mental training is clearness and accuracy of view, together with the strength to keep steadfastly looking into the world of intelligible things. What rouses desire tends to enslave; what gives delight tends to liberate; the one appeals to the senses, the other to the soul. Hence, intellectual and moral pleasures alone are associated with the sense of freedom and pure joy. The lovers of freedom are as rare as the lovers of truth and of God. For most, liberty is but a trader's commodity, to be parted with for price, as their obedience is a slave's service. The chief good consists in acting justly and nobly, rather than in thinking acutely and profoundly. The free play of the mind is delightful, but the law of moral obligation is the deepest thing in us. Honor, place, and wealth, which are won at the price of self-improvement, the wise will not desire. Great opportunities seldom present themselves, but every moment of every hour of thy conscious life is an opportunity to improve thyself, which for thee is the best and most necessary thing. Since our power over others is small, but over ourselves large, let us devote our energies to self-improvement. "Nor let any man say," writes Locke, "he cannot govern his passions, nor hinder them from breaking out and carrying him into action; for what he can do before a prince or great man he can do alone or in the presence of God, if he will."