A fundamental need is to find out the elements of power within us, and how they can be trained to good service and yoked to the chariot of influence. We need to know exactly for what work or sphere we are best fitted, so that when opportunities for service open before us, we may invest our mental capital with success and profit. Self-knowledge must not be confused with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he spoke of himself or mentioned his own name. George Eliot hits off pompous self-conceit happily when she likens its possessor to "a cock that thinks the sun rises in the morning to hear him crow." Margaret Fuller wrote: "I now know all the people in America worth knowing, and I have found no intellect comparable with my own." Even if she did not overrate herself, such self-estimate implied no little boldness in expression. We also read in Greek history, how, when the commanders of the allied fleets gave in, by request, a list of the names of those who had shown the highest valor and skill at the battle of Salamis, each put his own name first, graciously according to Themistocles, the real hero of the day, the second rank. Not a few come to know themselves only through failures and disappointments. Strangers to their own defects--perhaps also to their own powers--they see how they might have succeeded only when success is finally forfeited. Their eyes open too late. A Southern orator tells of a little colored lad who very much wished to have a kitten from a newborn litter, and whose mistress promised that, as soon as they wer old enough, he should take one. Too impatient to wait, he slyly carried one off to his hut. Its eyes were not open, and, in disgust, he drowned it. But, subsequently finding the kitten lying in the pail dead, but with open eyes, he exclaimed, "Umph! When you's alive, you's blind. Now you's dead, you see!" It will be a real calamity to us if our eyes only open when it is too late to make our life of any use. All true life-power has a basis of high _moral integrity_. Far higher in the scale than any life of impulse, passion, or even opinion, is the life regulated by principle. The end of life is something more than pleasure. Man is not a piece of vitalized sponge, to absorb all into himself. The essentials of happiness are something to love, something to hope for, something to do--affection, aspiration, action.