While patience is a virtue, it may also be a vice. One may bear wrongs too patiently or defer satisfaction too long. One meets every day men and women who help injustice and iniquity by their patience. We are too patient, at least with the wrongs of others; perhaps we really do not feel this intensely or for any length of time. In fact, the difficulty with most of the preaching of life is its essential insincerity, for it counsels patience for that which it feels but little. We bear the troubles of others, on the whole, very well. Nevertheless, there are Griseldas everywhere whom one would respect far more if they rebelled against their tyrants and taskmasters. Organized wrong and oppression owe their existence mainly to the habitual patience of the oppressed. To be meek and mild and long-suffering in a world containing plenty of egoists and cannibalistic types is to give them supremacy.[1] We admire patience only when it is part of a plan of action, not when it is the mark of a passive nature. [1] Here the ideals of East and West clash. The East, bearing a huge burden of misery and essentially pessimistic, exhorts patience. The West, eager and full of hope, is impatient. 4. Because man foresees he wishes. Rather than the reasoning animal, we might speak of the human being as the wishing animal. An automatically working instinct would produce no wish. The image of something which has been experienced arouses an excitement akin to the secretion of saliva at the thought of food. The wish which accompanies the excitement is a dissatisfaction, a tingling, an incomplete pleasurable emotional state which presses to action. Sensuous pleasure, power, conformity to the ideal, whatever direction the wish takes, are sought because of the wish. Right education is to train towards right wishing. Because the wish is the prelude to action, it became all powerful in mythology and superstition. Certain things would help you get your wishes, others would obstruct them. Wishes became animate and had power,--power to destroy an enemy, power to help a friend, power to bring good to yourself. But certain ceremonies had to be observed, and certain people, magicians and priests had to be utilized in order to give the wish its power. Wisdom and magic were mainly the ways of obtaining wishes. Childhood still holds to this, and prayer is a faith that your wish, if placed before the All-Mighty, will be fulfilled.