Chapter III: Part 3

Early students thought that the magnet pointed toward some particular spot in the sky, perhaps some magnetic star. One genius felt sure that there must be huge mountains of lodestone near the North Pole. This suggestion was followed by ingenious yarns to the effect that in the extreme North ships had to be built with wooden nails, instead of iron nails, as the magnetic mountains would draw the iron nails out of the ship.

After this came the more rational conception that our own earth is a great magnet, and that the little magnet in the compass simply obeys in pointing, the greater force of the earth magnet. ----

This editorial generalizing on the magnet is brought about by an incident telegraphed from Vallejo, California. John Gettegg, apprentice in the Navy Yard, had imbedded in his cheek a flying piece of steel. To get it out would apparently have demanded a painful and difficult surgical operation, as the piece of steel had entered the bone. But the head electrician, Petrio, simply placed near the wounded boy's face an electro-magnet capable of lifting five hundred pounds, and the sharp piece of steel instantly flew out of the cheek and attached itself to the magnet.

So much for one proof of the value of developing what may seem at first to be a foolish set of experiments.

In thousands of ways to-day this magnetic power is utilized.

You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the heads of the tacks and strike the basket.

In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in reality but an application of the force of the magnetic principle. ----

That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned. And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic force.

The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we depend, and with which we do our work.

When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not laugh at them too heartily. They are no more ridiculous than the old Greeks who thought that a magnet could be regulated by garlic or goat's blood. And their wild theories of to-day may settle down into great utility centuries from now. This applies to Christian Science, faith cures, telepathy, and the many other speculations of the present day. There is unquestionably much future fruit and value in many or all of them.

WHO IS INDEPENDENT? NOBODY

We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.

Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly stored away in your complex make-up.

You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.

But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world, and upon those back of them.

The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate white man whose ancestral start was better. ----

After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and after youth you are dependent on your education.

Facts are your tools, and you can't work without them.

If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your health--on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your internal machinery.

Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact. These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on your cook, and the cook's attention to business may depend on the politeness of the policeman in front of the house.

You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks your food.

WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS

There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great deal of land underneath it.

All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money in the savings bank for their young ones. ----

Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.

The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.

Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of Lake Superior.

Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean. You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara's surf.

In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh submarine springs to the surface.

But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath the waters covering two-thirds of the earth's surface.

This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines beneath the waters are indicated simply by latitude and longitude.

Mars, with his huge canals distributing a planet's waters scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth's centre and bringing up metals in a molten state.

Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble efforts.

WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED

Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from widely different parts of the earth?

Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.

The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the brain and makes possible its work.

The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell their story.

Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name, sits in your brain guiding the body. ----

Where did the body come from?

Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of it from spices grown in Ceylon.

In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has helped build up your strength.

A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.

Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.

To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees, and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up your body.

That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the Southern Sea. ----

Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.

We want to suggest this idea to you.

Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?

Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than hideous burial in the earth?

The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the dead than our present custom?

Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining, than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth, which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?

HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.

At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.

One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.

Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and members of Sorosis. ----

What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?

Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.

You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings. Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle and examining its imperfections.

The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.

Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.

In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love; there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its hard childhood. ----

But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage mothers with savage affection.

Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier, marriage and pure affection came into the world.

It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first marriage.

A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby, protecting it from wind and cold.

It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands clutch with monkey power all things within reach.

Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.

He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has added to earth's animal life.

Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders--something about it reminds him of his royal self, as studied in the pool. He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.

Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.

Says the mammoth hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat sounds half articulated:

"I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him. Don't you go out with him looking for food, and don't leave him alone while I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't have anything to say to that mammoth hunter in the next swamp. I want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me."

Off goes the father, and that savage mother, in a primitive way, is a wife. Hereafter she is to be cared for. Bears will be killed for her, even while she has children to keep her busy and unattractive. Society takes a new turn and the red-haired baby has done it.

To childhood, helpless and beautiful, we owe marriage and all that growth of morality which is gradually making us really civilized.

The basis of all real growth is altruism; and altruism, the inclination to think more of others than of yourself, came into the world through the cradle.

We owe such civilization as we have acquired to children.

"A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice--feeble things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the human race." ----

The influence of childhood has transformed mere animal attraction into unselfish affection. It has substituted family life for savage life. The interests of childhood demand that marriage and its responsibilities be held sacred.

Duty to future generations demands that divorce be made difficult and considered a misfortune.

Marriage, brought into the world through the influence of children, should be dissolved only with due regard for the interests of children. ----

An unhappy marriage is earth's worst affliction. Quite true. But it is not affliction wasted.

Examples are needed to warn the young against the matrimonial recklessness which underlies most unhappy marriages.

Unhappy wives and husbands are human light-houses--lonely, but useful.

If a gentle little Alderney calf should marry a sleek young zebra and afterward get kicked to death for her pains, we should all sympathize with her. But we should expect other mild-eyed Alderneys after that to beware of zebras.

As a matter of fact, this present divorce talk, which sets the good to fluttering, really interests a very unimportant class.

The man who spends his life spending what he didn't earn, feeding his physical senses, who goes from rum to the races, from the races to the opera, and from the opera to roulette, wears out his nervous sensations.

He then thinks that he is unhappily married. He has possibly driven his wife to being seven kinds of a fool.

But that is not her fault.

A man who marries a woman undertakes to make her happy and keep her busy. If he keeps his contract, she will keep hers.

If he fails, he has no right to experiment on another unfortunate. The divorce class is a self-indulgent, malformed class, not worth notice. ----

Professor Cope, an earnest man and serious thinker, believed that marriages should be contracted on probation--say for five years, with the right on both sides to refuse a renewal.

Theoretically, this would be beautiful. It would make courtship permanent, abolish curl-papered wives in the morning, and tipsy, bragging husbands at night.

But it wouldn't work. It would be all right for women. They are only too willing to be faithful and permanent.

But men cannot be trusted. The animal in them, so essential long ago, when the race was struggling for a foothold, has not been obliterated. They have got to be MADE responsible and HELD responsible. ----

As a matter of fact, there really is no marriage or divorce problem which sensible beings need consider.

At present men are not good enough to be trusted with liberal marriage or divorce laws. When they are good enough the laws will not be wanted. For the man fully developed and fully moral will know what he is doing when he goes into a marriage contract.

His stability of character will insure permanency. There will be no need of laws.

At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not be thicker than the husband's thumb."

Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless hard on some thin, worn-out women.

But that law is no longer needed.

Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating. In time they will outgrow the need of laws regarding infidelity and lack of self-respect.

MAN'S WILLINGNESS TO WORK

What a fortunate thing it is that men want to work and like to live! Suppose for a moment that the out-of-work, hungry, unlucky creatures, numbering one hundred thousand in New York City, should suddenly change their character.

It is a harmless supposition, as it implies that a great body of good, though unlucky, men should be suddenly metamorphosed. But suppose, for instance, that one hundred thousand men should have a meeting and say:

"The State provides food, lodging and good care for every thief. It does not provide anything for us. Let us therefore accept the situation like philosophers and become thieves."

Suppose the hundred thousand men thereupon, very quietly, without any show of violence, should each proceed to steal something and then announce the intention to accept the consequence by pleading guilty. It would embarrass the State and the reigning powers, would it not?

What could society do with a hundred thousand self-confessed thieves to take care of? It could not lock them up. It could not let them go. It could not nominally sentence them and have the Governor pardon them, because the hundred thousand would then proceed to steal something else.

What could be done? Nothing. There is no punishment save imprisonment for theft, and the wholesale thieves would ask for and demand imprisonment with the usual rations.

We think society is well balanced and that everything is ingeniously provided for.

So it is; but everything hinges on the extraordinary fact that the hungry, thin, common, shiftless, luckless man at the very bottom is still a MAN. He will not be a thief, and he will die of hunger and cold, as poor fellows do almost every winter day, rather than take the food that society guarantees to the thief.

We attribute much to our own wisdom and the wisdom of our laws. But we owe almost everything to the instinct of self-preservation and to that second, very peculiar, instinct called pride.

THE HUMAN BRAIN BEATS THE COAL MINES

For six million years, during the carboniferous period, the tree ferns dropped their pollen dust to the earth forming coal beds which now cook our dinners and incidentally make J. Pierpont Morgan so prosperous.

A good deal of useless anxiety has been devoted to the questions:

What will the human race do when the coal gives out? Shall we freeze, or begin planting huge forests of wood, or what?

In the first place, coal will not give out for a long, long time.

In the second place, its disappearance will not make the slightest difference, for in the few cubic inches of the human brain nature has stored up treasures greater than all those hidden in the depths of the earth. The creation of the human brain took more years than the creation of the coal fields, but the brain's resources are inexhaustible.

A German workman now comes along who has discovered a chemical substitute for coal, better than coal in many ways, and before this German shall have been dead many years some other will find a further substitute far better and cheaper than his.

There is endless heat power in the action of the tides, in the rush of Niagara, in the winds, and in endless chemical combinations. Heat is motion, and the Universe is motion. Men will soon cease lighting tiny bonfires to obtain crude heat in a crude way. Electricity or the sun's own rays, concentrated for heating purposes, will do the work without any digging in mines by men, or delving in ashes and clinkers by women.

The story of antiquity, more or less fictitious, of the burning of a fleet with the aid of a glass and the sunbeams, will be matter-of-fact reality long before the coal shall have been exhausted.

HOW THE OTHER PLANETS WILL TALK TO US

We talk of civilization as though it necessarily implied improvement.

Civilization means the school and the library, but it also means the prison and the poorhouse.

Two short stories illustrate different views of what we call civilization:

Aristippus was a young Greek gentleman of large means, genuine intellectual power, a sense of humor and a reputation as a philosopher.

He was on his way to Corinth with a young lady named Lais, or possibly he was coming from Corinth with her. Anyhow, he was wrecked on the voyage. If you know anything about the reputation of Lais, you know that the philosopher was badly employed, and that the Greek gods doubtless wrecked his vessel to impress upon his mind the importance of morality.

Thrown ashore on a barren stretch of sand, the philosopher was very sad at first. He observed on the sand the remains of certain geometrical drawings, and instantly exclaimed: "There is help near. Here I see signs of thinking men, of civilization." ----

Voltaire tells of wrecked individuals thrown on a lonely coast, and also much distressed and frightened.

They saw no geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human skeleton with bony wrists and ankles chained together.

Prayerfully the wanderers dropped on their knees and exclaimed with upturned eyes:

"Thank God, we have got back to civilization." ----

Thus, you see, there are varying signs of civilization. There is a great gulf between the signs perceived by Aristippus--signs of the mental activity which engages in geometrical demonstrations--and Voltaire's sign of civilization--the brutal execution of a brutal criminal. ----

Those accustomed to waste time in speculations that cannot bring a financial return may be interested in the following application of the sign of civilization which Aristippus immediately recognized back in the days of two thousand years ago.

We know that some day the inhabitants on Mars or some other planet will want to talk to us. They have doubtless been studying us and consider us still too barbarous and primitive to be worth talking to.

But when we become semi-civilized, in the cosmic sense of the word, the older and wiser planets will get ready to open communication with us.

How will they go about it? They are perhaps absolutely different from us, in shape, in manner of thought, in every conceivable way, including language, customs, and so on.

BUT GEOMETRICAL, MATHEMATICAL FACTS ARE THE SAME THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE.

Will not the wise Martian who wants to speak to us and decides to flash some message down here on our clouds, or on the surface of the water, utilize the universality of geometrical truths in order to make us understand that thinking beings are trying to talk to us?

The sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles.

That is true of every triangle, no matter what its shape, no matter whether it be drawn on this earth or on the most distant sun.

Therefore, when the Martian gentleman gets ready to talk to us he need only repeatedly place before us two right angles followed by a triangle, or a triangle followed by two right angles. Instantly, like Aristippus, we can say there is civilization in Mars, or wherever that sign comes from, or at least there is organized thought. The mind that is flashing that sign knows something about geometry.

Of course, we should also recognize "signs of civilization" if the Martians should project upon our atmosphere a skeleton hanging in chains. But it is to be hoped that the Martians have got beyond that particular evidence of civilization.

SHALL WE DO WITHOUT SLEEP SOME DAY?

A half-developed being like man, hanging midway between primitive barbarism and ultimate perfection, should study the insect tribes which appear to have realized the possibilities of development in their line.

The study of the ant and the bee, the spider and the scorpion should fill us with hope. We should say to ourselves:

"If these tiny fragments of life can develop so highly, what may not WE hope for in the way of ultimate possibilities? Our beginning is so much more full of promise than the beginnings of our tiny insect brothers." ----

This writer, taking his own advice, which is most unusual, has been trying to get acquainted with some insects in the hope of cheering himself and getting new ideas.

From the female scorpion we acquire fresh veneration for the possibilities of maternal devotion.

The mother of the Gracchi has been well advertised because she preferred her sons to jewelry. The Russian mother who feeds herself to the wolves, instead of throwing her boy over the back of the sleigh in the usual way, is also highly praised. But their devotion shrinks to nothing when compared with that of any poor mother scorpion of Mexico's sandy tracts.

As soon as her young scorpions arrive, they climb to her back, half a hundred of them or more. She moves about with them, protecting them, avoiding danger, giving them the sunlight. Meanwhile they are feeding on her body. Her movements get gradually slower and slower; finally they cease. The young scorpions depart leaving the mother scorpion simply an empty shell. We should dislike to see any such exhibition of tenderness among human beings, but we can't help admiring the scorpion.

Mr. Scorpion, placed as was Captain Dreyfus, would sting himself to death. They are a determined race. ----

Spiders who construct tiny balloons with little cars all complete are wonderful creatures. They cross chasms in their balloons, throwing out bits of trailing web which seem to act as rudders. In their little way and in a perfectly adequate fashion they have solved aerial navigation, which still puzzles us. We admire spiders and kill only those with yellow stomachs, which are "poison." ----

But up to the present we have found the ant the most interestingly suggestive creature. He has developed and understands stirpiculture--the improvement of the race by careful breeding--which with us is as yet mere theory, and as we look down at the ant, we look up to him because the strangely active creature manages to do without sleep.

We human beings drowse through thirty years of our threescore and ten, but the ant is awake and working all the time.

If the ant has managed to live without sleep, if he has acquired the faculty of lifelong wakefulness, why should we not do as much in time? We take it for granted that sleep is essential, as we take everything else for granted. We used to take it for granted that the earth was flat, but we have stopped that. Sleep was at one time forced upon man and other animals.

The earth in its rollings turned away from the sun once in every twenty-four hours. In the darkness of the beginning man said to himself: "If I go walking around, I shall fall into a hole, so I shall lie down and wait until the sun comes again."

He did as all the animals did before him for millions of years. Since that time, man has conquered darkness. Why should he not ultimately conquer sleep?

We know that thin men, nervous, highly organized, do with far less sleep than others. We know that old age requires less sleep than youth.

Can we not cultivate and develop the characteristics which make sleep less necessary? Higher races of apes have abolished tails.

Can't we abolish sleep? ----

As old age needs less sleep than babyhood, so in our maturity as a human race we shall probably demand less sleep than now in our racial babyhood. Perhaps none at all will be needed.

If that happens our lives will be doubled in value, they will be complete. The hours of sunlight will be devoted to examination and admiration of nature's beauties on this earth.

The hours of darkness, given up to sleep no longer, will be devoted to the study of space, to investigation among other worlds.

That kind of life will be worth while. Bear in mind that we shall only really begin to live on this earth when we shall have settled all the little social and material questions here and shall have begun in earnest the study of the universe in which we are a speck.

The days of the future will be given up to artistic enjoyment of the beautiful. The nights will be devoted to intellectual development and research.

Man will LIVE.

THE THREE BEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

If you had choice of all qualities which man can possess, which three would you declare most important?

This question is submitted as interesting every man. We give our answer; if yours is different, send it here. ----

SELF-CONTROL.

JUSTICE.

IMAGINATION.

Those we think the most important elements in the human character. A man fully and evenly equipped with all three would be greater than any the world has known. ----

SELF-CONTROL you must start with.

It makes life worth while. It frees you from the danger of remorse, the wasted time of self- reproach. It sees opportunities as they come; saves you from damaging temptation. It is as important to a brain as is physical equilibrium to a work of masonry.

A man without self-control, a building out of plumb, cannot endure.

JUSTICE.

It is the foundation of all reputation worth the having. It is to man as necessary as the compass to a ship. It is the compass.

Justice will give reputation for greatness though you create nothing great. It will win affectionate reverence in life and a gratifying gravestone at life's end. ----

IMAGINATION.

Greatest gift to man. It finds him grovelling here a pithecoid littleness.

The rough hair is gone from his body. His thumb has lost its monkey smallness; he walks flat on his feet.

But beyond that he has naught else to thank material nature for.

All the rest comes to him from imagination. Marvellous work she performs. She takes naked man with his low forehead, with his gruntings and whistlings through his teeth, and makes of him what man was meant to be.

Very slowly she works, but ceaselessly. Her task is not nearly ended. At her first glimmerings man's real life begins. He learns from her to add wood to a fire. No monkey ever did it. That stamps him a man.

Soon, with her help, he leaves the earth and travels off ten thousand million miles into space. He counts the suns in the Milky Way; travels in the air, under the water; harnesses lightning, controls nature. By IMAGINATION he is made CAPTAIN of this earthen ship on which he travels through space.

IMAGINATION separates Archimedes, working at his problems in the sunlight, from the vile soldier that slaughtered him.

Shakespeare rattling his ale pot and Johanna, the ape, shaking her bars at the Zoo are alike, save for difference of imagination.

SELF-CONTROL to balance you.

JUSTICE to guide you.

IMAGINATION to lend creative power.

"Equilibrium, Direction, Creation."

The TRINITY ardently to be desired. ----

Long ago Plato announced that apparent differences are deceptive; that all things existing come from one casting--the mind of God--which he names "idea."

Similarly to-day the solemn-thinking German tells you that matter and force are identical, that the interchangeable character of forces--heat light, magnetism, etc.--is part of the a, b, c of proved phenomena.

Haeckel stops digging up old bones and classifying sea microscopic organisms long enough to write "Monism," expressing his belief that God is anything and everything from Orion to a tumble- bug.

It is quite easy to show that the selected three--self-control, justice and imagination--are in reality one. Each exists as part of the others. Each is made up of the other two.

But this column is not devoted to any save simple things.

The question is this, once more:

What are man's three most useful qualities--which three would you possess?

Do not call this question idle or believe that we cannot change ourselves. We CAN.

Napoleon said: "Never believe that a man ever changed his temperament."

But Napoleon often said what was foolish.

It ought to delight you to know that you can change yourself if you want to, as you can change the arrangement of your back parlor.

Try it. It is hard work, but good exercise.

THE VALUE OF SOLITUDE

We inflict a piece of advice upon our readers. It is intended especially for the young, who have still to get their growth, whose characters and possibilities are forming.

GET AWAY FROM THE CROWD WHEN YOU CAN. KEEP YOURSELF TO YOURSELF, IF ONLY FOR A FEW HOURS DAILY. ----

Full individual growth, special development, rounded mental operations--all these demand room, separation from others, solitude, self-examination and the self-reliance which solitude gives.

The finest tree stands off by itself in the open plain. Its branches spread wide. It is a complete tree, better than the cramped tree in the crowded forest.

The animal to be admired is not that which runs in herds, the gentle browsing deer or foolish sheep thinking only as a fraction of the flock, incapable of personal independent direction. It's the lonely prowling lion or the big black leopard with the whole world for his private field that is worth looking at.

The man who grows up in a herd, deer-like, thinking with the herd, acting with the herd, rarely amounts to anything. ----

Do you want to succeed? Grow in solitude, work, develop in solitude, with books and thoughts and nature for friends. Then, if you want the crowd to see how fine you are, come back to it and boss it if it will let you.

Constant craving for indiscriminate company is a sure sign of mental weakness.

Schopenhauer--a sour genius, BUT a genius--speaks contemptuously of the negroes herded in small rooms unable to get "enough of one another's snub-nose company." ----

If you enter a village or small town and want to find the man or youth of ability, do you look for him leaning over the village pool table, sitting on the grocery store boxes, lounging in the smelly tavern with other vacant minds?

Certainly not. You find him at work, and you find him by himself.

Think how public institutions dwarf the brains and souls of unhappy children condemned to live in them. No chance there for individual, separate development. Millions of children have grown up in such places millions of sad nonentities. ----

Here is what Goethe says:

"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, doch ein Charakter in dem Strome der Welt." (Talent is developed in solitude, character in the rush of the world.)

You wonder why so much ability comes from the country--why a Lincoln comes from the backwoods while you, flourishing in a great city, can barely keep your place as a typewriter.

The countryman has GOT to be by himself much of the time whether he wishes to or not. If he has anything in him it comes out.

Astronomy, man's grandest study, grew up among the shepherds. You of the cities never even see the stars, much less study them.

----

Don't be a sheep or a deer. Don't devote your hours to the company and conversation of those who know as little as you do. Don't think hard only when you are trying to remember a popular song or to decide on the color of your Winter overcoat or necktie.

Remember that you are an individual, not a grain of dust or a blade of grass. Don't be a sheep; be a man. It has taken nature a hundred million years to produce you. Don't make her sorry she took the time.

Get out in the park and walk and think. Get up in your hall bedroom, read, study, write what you think. Talk more to yourself and less to others. Avoid magazines, avoid excessive newspaper reading.

There is not a man of average ability but could make a striking career if he could but WILL to do the best that is in him.

Proofs of growth due to solitude are endless. Milton's greatest work was done when blindness, old age and the death of the Puritan government forced him into completest seclusion. Beethoven did his best work in the solitude of deafness.

Bacon would never have been the great leader of scientific thought had not his trial and disgrace forced him from the company of a grand retinue and stupid court to the solitude of his own brain.

"Multum insola fuit anima mea." (My spirit hath been much alone.) This he said often, and lucky it was for him. Loneliness of spirit made him.

Get a little of it for yourself.

Drop your club, your street corner, your gossipy boarding-house table. Drop your sheep life and try being a man.

It may improve you.

THERE SHOULD BE A MONUMENT TO TIME

Time has no real existence. Yet time is man's most precious possession.

Time is defined as a "succession of events." What we call an hour means certain movements in the machinery of a watch. What we call a day means one revolution of the earth upon its axis, the turning of its surface toward the light of the sun. Time is the most mysterious factor in our lives and thoughts. It never had a beginning, it cannot possibly have an end.

Time only exists for us in the actual moment in which we live. Yet our thoughts are in the time of past and future, and hardly ever on the actual reality of the moment.

With the ceasing of our own consciousness, time ceases, so far as we are concerned. If you go to sleep and sleep soundly, you cannot tell when you awake whether you have slept a minute or an hour. Time stops when YOU cease to observe the succession of events. In dying, we duplicate on a big and prolonged scale our little daily sleeps in life.

If a man were told that after death his soul would not regain consciousness for a thousand millions of years, he would worry, and complain of the "long time." But it would make no difference to him whether the time were a thousand millions of years or forty seconds--time would not exist for him; he would not know the difference.

There is little doubt that to the ephemeridae, creatures that live but for a day, that day must seem as long as our century, for in their life of incessant activity and agitation every second is a long space. And there is no doubt that to the giant turtles of the Galapagos Islands, heavy monsters that live ten centuries or longer, a week is a fraction of time far less important than an hour to us. ----

A mysterious thing is time and its divisions. Man manufactures a watch capable of registering a fraction of a second. And in the force called light we have a power that can go seven times around the world in one second.

We estimate our time by years. It takes one year for our little earth to spin round the sun. And during that year it turns three hundred and sixty-five times on its own axis. While the entire body of our earth flies through space, accompanying the sun on its journey, the northern extremity of our planet has a separate circular motion of its own. This circular motion takes twenty-seven thousand years to complete one circle, and as it moves in this inconceivably slow journey our pole selects for us and points out the various suns which in turn we call the North Star.

We have written thus much to fix the attention of readers on the question of time. Now, how does it affect you? Time represents your only chance, your only wealth, your only possibility for achieving anything.

The man who lasts fifty years lives about four hundred and thirty-eight thousand hours. Sleep takes at least one-third, or one hundred and forty-six thousand hours. The processes of eating, washing, dressing, getting up and going to bed take up at least three hours per day, or fifty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty hours.

In addition to all this TIME cut out of our lives there is the time devoted to amusement, the time devoted to idle dreaming--and yet millions of people are wondering how they can "PASS THE TIME."

In every great city and in every small town there should be a monument to time. Young children should be taken to see it, clergymen should preach at the foot of it on the sacred importance of the few hours of activity given to us here. As the sand runs through an hour glass, so you run your short race on this earth. That passing sand means the passing of your chances for making your life worth while. Instead of thinking how you WILL pass the time, cross-examine yourself and ask yourself how you HAVE passed the time thus far.

What did you do last year--what use did you make of the time as it went by? What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do to-day? You possess a mind organized for practically unlimited thinking and studying. How many of your hours do you live as a thinking, studying man? How many do you live on a par with an ox chewing his cud in the field?

The ox does not waste HIS time. It is his business to grow fat and produce beef. He uses every hour. It is your business to use your time in the development of your mind, in dealing with the duties and problems that are put before you.

Every young man can make a success if he will really look upon each hour as an OPPORTUNITY, and cease to look upon the hours as useless things, to be thrown away.

One hour will give you a knowledge of some good book, or wisely spent, with a purpose of improving your health, it will make your brain more efficient and add to the value of all future hours.

If you have a horse, a bicycle, a gun, you feel that because you HAVE it you ought to USE it.

How much more should you feel that you ought to use your TIME, in using which you use your own brain! Surely, your brain is more important and more worthy of conscientious use than a bicycle or a gun.

Talk to children on this question of time. Teach them that respect for time means respect for their own lives and success in life.

A MOTHER'S WORK AND HER HOPES

This editorial is not written for women. It is written for MEN, and for boys; for the millions who fail to appreciate the work that mothers do, for the millions that ignore the self-sacrifice and devotion upon which society is based.

On a hot night, in the dusty streets of a dirty city, you see hundreds of women sitting in the doorways, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.

In lonesome farm houses, far out on monotonous plains, with the late sun setting on a long day of hard work, you find women, cheerful and persevering, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.

In the middle of the night, in earliest morning, when MEN sleep, all over the world, in ice huts North, in southern tents, in big houses and in dingy tenements, you find women awake, cheerfully and gladly TAKING CARE OF BABIES. ----

We respect and praise the man selfishly working for himself.

If he builds up a great industry and a great personal fortune, we praise him.

If he risks his life for personal glory and for praise, we praise him.

If he shows courage even in saving his own carcass from destruction, we praise him.

There was never a man whose courage, or devotion, could be compared with that of a woman caring for her baby.

The mother's love is unselfish, and it has no limit this side of the grave.

You will find ONE man in a thousand who will risk his life for a cause.

You will find a THOUSAND women in a thousand who will risk their lives for their babies.

Everything that a man has and is he owes to his mother. From her he gets health, brain, encouragement, moral character, and ALL his chances of success.

How poorly the mother's service is repaid by men individually, and by society as a whole!

The individual man feels that he has done much if he gives sufficient money and a LITTLE attention to her who brought him from nothingness into life and sacrificed her sleep and youth and strength for his sake.

Society, the aggregate of human beings, feels that its duty is done when a few hospitals are opened for poor mothers, and a little medicine doled out in cold-hearted fashion to the sick child.

Fortunately, it may truly be said that the great man is almost always appreciative of his greater mother.

Napoleon was cold, jealous of other men, monumentally egotistical when comparing himself with other sons of women. But he reverenced and appreciated the noble woman who bore him, lived for him, and watched over him to the end. He said:

"It is to my mother, to her good principles, that I owe my success and all I have that is worth while. I do not hesitate to say that the future of the child depends on the mother." ----

The future of the individual child depends on the individual mother, and the future of the race depends on the mothers of the race.

Think what has been done for mankind by thousands of millions of perfectly devoted mothers.

Every mother is entirely DEVOTED, entirely HOPEFUL, entirely CONFIDENT that no future is too great for her baby's deserts.

The little head--often hopelessly ill-shaped--rolls about feebly on the thin neck devoid of muscles. The toothless gums chew whatever comes along. The wondering eyes look feebly, aimlessly about, without focus or concentration. The future human being, to the cold-blooded onlooker, is a useless little atom added to the human sea of nonentity.

But to the mother that baby is the marvel of all time. There is endless meaning in the first mumblings, endless soul in the senile, baby smile, unlimited possibilities in the knobby forehead and round, hairless head. She sees in the future of the baby responsibilities of government, and feels that one so perfectly lovely must eventually be acclaimed ruler by mankind.

As a result of perfect confidence in its future, the mother gives to every baby perfect devotion, perfect and affectionate moral education. Each child begins life inspired by the most beautiful example of altruism and self-sacrifice.

Kindness has gradually taken the place of brutality among human beings, because every baby at its birth has found itself surrounded by absolute kindness.

The mother's kindness forms moral character.

The mother's confidence and encouragement stimulate ambition and inspire courage.

The mother's patient watchfulness gives good health, and fights disease when it comes.

The mother's wrathful protection shields the child from the stern and dwarfing severity of fathers.

Truly, a man may and should be judged by his feeling toward his own mother, and toward the mothers of other men--of ALL men.

In the character of Christ, whose last earthly thought on Golgotha was for His Mother, as in the character of the hard-working, ignorant man whose earnings go to make his mother comfortable, the most beautiful trait is devotion to the mother who suffers and works for her children, from the hours that precede their birth through all the years that they spend on earth together.

Honor thy father and THY MOTHER.

And honor the mothers of other men. Make their task easier through fair payment of the men who support the children, through good public schools for their children, through respectful treatment of ALL women.

The mother is happy. For she knows "the deep joy of loving some one else more than herself."

You honor yourself, and prove yourself worthy of a good mother and of final success, when you do something for the mothers of the world.

YOUR WORK IS YOUR BRAIN'S GYMNASIUM

For "buyers" in big stores,

For clerks in little stores,

For office boys,

For typewriters, reporters, car conductors, household domestics, for all who are hired to work for others, this article is intended.

There is no greater mistake than skimping your work--BECAUSE YOU ARE WORKING FOR ANOTHER, AND FEAR YOU MAY DO TOO MUCH.

For your own sake remember that whatever you do in the way of honest concentrated work you do FIRST OF ALL FOR YOURSELF.

Only one thing in the world can improve you and better your condition, and that thing is your own effort.

You begin life with certain mental faculties, and with certain muscular faculties. Their development or decay depends entirely on yourself.

No work that you do is worthless. It will NEVER pay you to neglect or slur the task that you have undertaken.

You may be idle, in the thought that you are indulging yourself at the expense of your employer. It is a dishonest thought, and it is a stupid thought at the same time.

You may rob your employer of the time that he pays for, but when you shirk your work you rob yourself first of all. ----

You may say that your employer pays you too little. Perhaps he does. But that is no reason for hurting your moral character through dishonesty. It is no excuse for failing to develop yourself.

The store, or factory, or office in which you work is to your mind what a gymnasium is to your muscles.

You enter a gymnasium AND PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF WORKING THERE.

You do not say to yourself: "This gymnasium belongs to another man. The profits go to him, and so I'll not work hard."

On the contrary, you realize that the owner of the gymnasium gives you the chance to develop your muscles, and you thank him, although he makes you pay for the privilege. And you do your very best, on the trapeze, rings, parallel bars, or in any other direction.

Act in your work as you do in your gymnasium hours.

There is no kind of work that can fail to make you a better and more successful man if you work at it honestly and loyally.

If you sweep an office, sweep it well. And begin punctually each day, remembering that punctuality acquired in sweeping an office may be used later in governing a city.

Train your mind through your work, whatever it is.

Study the lives of those who have succeeded. You will see that they did whatever they did as well as they could.

Edison was an ordinary telegraph operator. But he was not content with merely working as others worked. He worked very hard, devised means to make more valuable the instruments of his employers. Soon he was an employer himself, and what is far better than being an employer, he was a creator of new ideas and a benefactor of the world. ----

Intelligent readers will not misinterpret this advice to mean that they should OVERWORK themselves, or work regardless of their own physical welfare.

The right course is this:

Do as much as you can in the present, without drawing on your future reserves.

Don't work all night and then go on the next day. Such effort impairs permanently your store of vitality, and that vitality is your capital.

But never form the habit of neglecting work, of shamming and lying instead of achieving honestly.

You may deceive one employer, or ten. But 36> you can't deceive nature, and you can't deceive yourself.

You can form good habits only through regular work. You can develop your faculties only through exercising them honestly and systematically. ----

MERELY WORKING "FAIRLY WELL" IS NOT ENOUGH.

If you want to run a mile fast, you do not merely jog. You try every day to run the mile faster than you did the day before. If you want to learn to jump high, you strain your muscles and try over and over to do what you can't do. Ultimately you achieve it.