This is true in a large measure even of persons, though less true of them than of the more impersonal wholes. We are seldom conscious of our personal growth in any large way; we meet details and decide as best we can, but the general flow of our time, our country, our class, our temperament, carries us along without our being definitely aware of it. It is hardly possible for us to know what is taking place in us until it is already accomplished: contemporary history, in an individual as in a nation, eludes our comprehension. A country girl finds work in a city office, and presently discovers that she has taken on the hurry and excitement of the town and cannot do without it; a student enters college and at the end of the year finds himself a different man, without having intended it, or knowing how it came about. We take one rather than another of the paths opening before us: they do not seem to diverge much, but one leads around to the west and another to the east. We do not know what choices are important and what are not. In only a few matters do we think out a policy, and in much fewer do we carry it out. As Emerson said, there is less purpose in the careers of successful men than we ascribe to them; and one could soon fill a note-book with testimony that the man and his work often find each other by mere chance. A man is hungry and plans how to get a dinner, in love and schemes to get a wife, desires power and racks his brain for ways to get it; but it can hardly be said that our intelligence is often directed to the rational organization of our character as a whole. With some men it is, certainly, but even they often find that they have failed to understand their own tendency. Martin Luther declared that “No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it.”