This superstition comes largely from our incorrigible habit of looking back over the past, and putting purpose into it. The great man looking back over his career, over his ascent from the humble level of his boyhood to his present power and riches, imagines that that ideal success was in his mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress, which was really the happy seizing of fortunate opportunities, as the carrying-out of a fixed purpose. But the purpose was not there at the beginning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture, which completes and satisfies our age-long hunger for the orderly and correct. But we all, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live from hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the beginning a crude mass of puzzling possibilities. All of us, unless we inherit a place in the world,--and then we are only half alive,--have the same precarious struggle to get a foothold. The difference is in the fortune of the foothold, and not in our private creation of any mystical force of will. It is a question of happy occasions of exposure to the right stimulus that will develop our powers at the right time. The capacity alone is sterile; it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce activity and success. The part that our free will can play is to expose ourselves consciously to the stimulus; it cannot create it or the capacity, but it can bring them together. In other words, for the rational ideal we must substitute the experimental ideal. Life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and the realization of ideals are to be tested and observed. We are not to start life with a code of its laws in our pocket, with its principles of activity already learned by heart, but we are to discover those principles as we go, by conscientious experiment. Even those laws that seem incontrovertible we are to test for ourselves, to see whether they are thoroughly vital to our own experience and our own genius. We are animals, and our education in life is, after all, different only in degree, and not in kind, from that of the monkey who learns the trick of opening his cage. To get out of his cage, the monkey must find and open a somewhat complicated latch. How does he set about it? He blunders around for a long time, without method or purpose, but with the waste of an enormous amount of energy. At length he accidentally strikes the right catch, and the door flies open. Our procedure in youth is little different. We feel a vague desire to expand, to get out of our cage, and liberate our dimly felt powers. We blunder around for a time, until we accidentally put ourselves in a situation where some capacity is touched, some latent energy liberated, and the direction set for us, along which we have only to move to be free and successful. We will be hardly human if we do not look back on the process and congratulate ourselves on our tenacity and purpose and strong will. But