What does not conduce in some way to men’s interests does not enhance life. What decides in the long run whether our life will be adventurous or not is the direction and the scope of our interests. We need a livelier imaginative sympathy and interest in all that pertains to human nature and its workings. It is a good sign that youth does not need to have its attention called to the worthy and profitable interest of its own personality. It is a healthy sign that we are getting back home again to the old endeavor of “Know thyself!” Our widening experience has shifted the centre of gravity too far from man’s soul. A cultivation of the powers of one’s own personality is one of the greatest needs of life, too little realized even in these assertive days, and the exercise of the personality makes for its most durable satisfactions. Men are attentive to their business affairs, but not nearly enough to their own deeper selves. If they treated their business interests as they do the interests of their personality, they would be bankrupt within a week. Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation, of their own experience. Few know how to weave a philosophy of life out of it, that most precious of all possessions. And few know how to hoard their memory. For no matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how imperfect and jagged--in some places perhaps irreparably--our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.