It is, of course, true that wrong information may lead sometimes to right action, as falsehood may secure obedience to a natural law which would otherwise have been violated. But in the long run men and nations pay dearly for every illusion they cherish. For every sick man healed at Denver or Lourdes, ten well men may be made sick. Faith cure and patent medicines feed on the same victim. For every Schlatter who is worshiped as a saint, some equally harmless lunatic will be stoned as a witch. This scientific age is beset by the non-science which its altruism has made safe. The development of the common sense of the people has given security to a vast horde of follies, which would be destroyed in the unchecked competition of life. It is the soundness of our age which has made what we call its decadence possible. It is the undercurrent of science which has given security to human life, a security which obtains for fools as well as for sages. For protection against all these follies which so soon fall into vices, or decay into insanity, we must look to the schools. A sound recognition of cause and effect in human affairs is our best safeguard. The old common sense of the "un-high-schooled man," aided by instruments of precision, and directed by logic, must be carried over into the schools. Clear thinking and clean acting, we believe, are results of the study of nature. When men have made themselves wise, in the wisdom which may be completed in action, they have never failed to make themselves good. When men have become wise with the lore of others, the learning which ends in self, and does not spend itself in action, they have been neither virtuous nor happy. "Much learning is a weariness of the flesh." Thought without action ends in intense fatigue of soul, the disgust with all the "sorry scheme of things entire," which is the mark of the unwholesome and insane philosophy of Pessimism. This philosophy finds its condemnation in the fact that it has never yet been translated into pure and helpful life.