The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the Christian circles of ideals into another circle. The successful method would be to face immediately new purposes and aims that are really believed, and for which men wish to live. But many of our young generation know of no new purposes and aims in which they can believe. Hence comes that spiritual apathy which has mastered a great part of the young generation. Without undervaluing the influences of environment, I still believe that young people who have lost their ideals without getting new ones in their place are to be pitied. The young who are not making ideals out of their own souls will have no other time than this to find ideals. A generation of young men of this type laughed at Socrates. They would have nailed Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross, with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have become, undoubtedly, in 1789, _emigrés_ with the Bourbons. When the youth of any period remains without ideals, we pass through a _fin de siècle_ period no matter what the exact date may be. But when the young generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts to do, a new century begins. It is always the fortunate right of young people to stimulate individualism before everything else. This is done every time a young person full of sound egoism develops his own personality completely and powerfully, throws himself keenly into the struggle for his own fortune. Any one who takes his individual development seriously will find that it is hard to become an independent, noble, and exalted personality by treading underfoot other individuals. He will moreover see that it makes more demands on his personal powers to try to create new values by new means, to devote his youthful energy to new tasks, than to look back to ideas that are already exhausted. There is another truth the young man will soon find to be valid. If an individual throws himself into the struggle of life without consideration for any one else, he is all the more likely to get hurt in the struggle. The more developed, too, an individual is, the more assailable points there are about him to be wounded. Great pain, as well as great happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life. Failures of a personality are often better proofs that it is above the average than its victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave our innermost personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean, that we lay on the wounds of others.