Pompeii fill one with awe, but a deserted city, pregnant with possibilities and haunted with ghost-like memories, is a horrible monument of unmeasurable calamity. It is expressive of a weird desolation, analogous to that of a human mind neglected and unused, with empty homes, streets and sections abandoned and the whole structure in tottering decay.

The mind not only has to function to acquire, but has to be fittingly exercised with psychological efficiency in order to retain. Locke has said, "There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas; even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive, so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out and at last there remains nothing to be seen." Great virtues are never acquired by slight endeavors, and a healthy, vigorous, well-developed mind can only result from intelligent training, unwavering purpose and diversified exercise.

Life is evolving with hysterical speed; our age is one of extreme nervous tension. Man is living under tremendous pressure and the pace of life is terrific; its very momentum tending toward the unnatural, the superficial and the materialistic. Men whirl in dizziness and rush blindly in their orbits, their true selves numbed and deadened, their sense of proportion lost, their vision of life and reality blurred and out of focus. The whirl of existence produces not even the hysterical asceticism of the fanatical whirling and howling dervish, but rather

the empty-headedness and dizziness of an abused, neglected mentality in a puppet body, foolishly jerked about here and there in a mad endeavor to participate in the show of life.

Merely to breathe, walk, eat and sleep does not mean that we live, and even if all our abdominal organs function well, such a fact is not of necessity indicative of robust health. Cicero fittingly said that "The diseases of the mind are more and more destructive than those of the body." Even erroneous thoughts are better than none at all, for, whereas error enslaves, disuse and inactivity kill; there is always hope of freedom for the enslaved-there is no hope of recovery for the dead.

The modern world is enslaved and worships at the shrine of externals. Men are judged and graded not by what they are but by what they appear to be; they are classified by the world, not with standards of mind and soul, but by faulty material measures of worldly wealth and fame. When psychological properties are acknowledged, they are weighed in the scales of popular belief by the crowd, which is always many long years behind the genius and the leaders of progressive thought. Two thousand years ago Seneca expounded a fundamental truth when he said, "If you live according to nature you will never be poor; if according to the world's caprices, you will never be rich."

Montaigne, in one of his essays, wrote "It is marvelous that we ourselves are the only things not esteemed for their proper qualities. We commend a horse for his strength and speed, not for his trappings; a greyhound for his swiftness, not his collar.

Why do we not esteem a man for that which is his own? He has a goodly train of followers, a stately palace, so much rent coming in, so much credit among men. Alas, all that is about him, not in him.

If you buy a horse, you see him bare of saddle and clothes. When you judge a man, why consider his wrappings only? In a sword it is the quality of the blade, not the value of the scabbard, to which you give heed. A man should be judged by what he is himself, not by his appurtenances. Let him lay aside his riches and external honors and show himself in his shirt. Has he a sound body? What mind has he? Is it fair, capable and unpolluted and happily equipped in all its parts? Is it a mind to be settled, equable, contented and courageous in any circumstances?" Epictetus said that cattle care only for fodder, and, in the great fair of the world, some men exhibit the same dwarfed and restricted materialistic sentiments. He classed all externals as mere fodder, saying, "To all of you, who busy yourselves about possessions and farms and domestics and public posts, these things are nothing else but mere fodder." The great question to be asked in determining the success or failure of any individual life is not "What did he acquire?" but "What did he think and what did he do?" Or, in other words, "What kind of a mind did he have and did he use it?"

"Were I so tall to reac

Or grasp the ocean

I must be measu
The mind's the

Man's noblest a

potentialities; to bear fruit from every seedling implanted in the human brain by Cosmic creative power; to neglect or abuse none; to nurture and utilize all. Every person is responsible for the development and use of all the forces within the scope of his inherent abilities and no one can tell whose sphere will prove the largest. To do the best one can, is a worthy motive when it is applied to all one's diversified capabilities and when each deed is performed thoughtfully and with the full exercise of one's marvelous God-like mind. The statement "He does the best he can" is usually suggestive of failure, coupled with a belittling explanation and subtle criticism. The manly part is to do with might and main all that is possible,—no half-hearted devotion, no drifting in the current of events and opinions, but determined purpose, energy, enthusiasm and achievement. He who does all his circumstances allow, "does well, acts nobly; angels could do no more."

In our civilization of artificialities, man is prone to neglect his wonderful birthright, follow blindly the common herd and mimic the sentiments of the hour with parrot glibness. In this twentieth century, the hardest task a man can give himself is to hink, to exercise his mental forces honestly and hdividually with the practice of reason and logic. Automatons with slothful minds and dwarfed souls it aimlessly across the stage of life. Many men wonderful gifts-philosophers, scienembryo-carry with them but the

do

of their failure to utilize those expression they were created.

We are living in a self-satisfied age of dissatisfaction; as Deshouliere has said, "No one is satisfied with his fortune, nor dissatisfied with his intellect." Would that every living man could be awakened like Saul of Tarsus and see vividly that truth which shows absolute and relative values and the end of each of the pathways traversed through life. The more superficial a man is, the more self-satisfied he seems to become. It is well to recall the philosophical admonition of Quarles, "Be always displeased at what thou art, if thou desire to attain what thou art not; for when thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest." Self-satisfaction is of all things most unprofitable; rather than think, record or boast of our own achievements, time would be better spent in noting faults and reckoning up defects, a formidable task for even the most worthy. We are told that this is the age of the specialist, but is this any legitimate argument why a man of five talents should use only one? A specialist with one narrow line of thought may contribute to the world's knowledge and advancement, but a man of concentrated mentality, feeding and developing his mind through the exercise of all phases of his psychological endowment, is a far more potent specialist in the line on which he chooses to concentrate his efforts, for his vision is of wide as well as deep focus and he sees not only the line, but the field that is more or less allied with it and the forces that converge into or radiate from it. A man with a great predominating talent is made greater and his usefulness to the world is vastly intensified as he develops to the utmost not only the one great lumi