"From the total training during childhood there should result in the child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should direct and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling which results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main end of elementary education; and that schooling which does not result in implanting this permanent taste has failed. Guided and animated by this impulse to acquire knowledge, and exercise his imagination through reading, the individual will continue to educate himself all through life. Without that deep-rooted impulsion he will soon cease to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past and the new resources of the present, and, as he grows older, he will live in a mental atmosphere which is always growing thinner and emptier. Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum--to whom, indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality, because they apparently have so little life except that of the body? _Fifteen minutes a day of good reading would have given any one of this multitude a really human life._"[1] To meet this condition, which prevails throughout the length and breadth of our land, to stimulate a deeper interest, quicken a latent appreciation and facilitate the use of brief periods of freedom for self-improvement, the Delphian Society was organized and the Delphian Course of Reading made possible. Believing that only a comprehensive course could meet the requirements of the day and prove acceptable to a large number of people, the Delphian Society has included those subjects which are now offered in the curriculums of our leading colleges and universities--history, literature, philosophy, poetry, fiction, drama, art, ethics, music. Mathematics, being in its higher forms essential to few, has been omitted; languages, requiring the aid of a teacher, and such sciences as make laboratories necessary, are not included. None of these subjects possess purely cultural qualities. Technical information has no place whatever in such a scheme. The branches of human interest which remain are those of vital importance to everyone.