genuinely new insights. One may read broadly with profit if he can bring the materials thus gathered into relation with each other, but that is not desultory reading. In sum: not merely is it true that desultory reading neither enriches the person nor educates his powers of perception or appreciation, it has, if carried too far, the dangers and disadvantages of any superficial and passive amusement, such as vaudeville. The average life of the steady theater-goer is said to be eight years. At the end of this period the theater has exhausted for him all its charms. Roughly speaking, the same is probably true of the desolutory reader of novels and other forms of "current literature," or would be if there were any other resource to which he could turn.

Read therefore, says Emerson, with reference to some more or less definite plan, whether it be to understand some subject as current international politics, or some painter of life like Shakespeare or George Eliot.

25. Let one's general aim be determined by his tastes. There is no value in that which cannot be made to become, in the end, in some fashion or other, interesting to the reader. Then pursue your choice in a systematic and active

way. In selecting this aim which need not be permanent in the sense of life long, and, of course, should be dominant rather than exclusive-it must never be forgotten that one's most precious interests may be lying undeveloped and thus unsuspected or only half suspected, in the mind; that there is an unhealthy taste in reading as in food, the criterion of health being permanence and extent of profit and pleasure and the possibility of combining both pleasure and profit; and finally that when the craving for the new and the sensational has been given full sway, it kills every other taste and then ends by committing suicide.

Since then your choice must be determined, in the last resort, by your tastes, find out first what your real tastes are, even if it takes effort and time to do so; and among your tastes follow those which are healthiest and in the pursuit of which it will be possible for you to kill the largest number of birds with one stone.

26. Emerson and those who have advised as he does ignore all books besides those which are great on account of their art, or which aim to lead us to wisdom, or which deal with the most fundamental aspects of human life.

But even with regard to the last named books, those which are less good than the best often give us light on certain important and permanent phases of human nature, for which the classics of any language may be searched in vain. Thus one may gain from Roosevelt's Rough Riders a better insight into certain features of the spirit that has made war a leading fact of history than from any classic with which I, at least, am acquainted. Henry M. Stanley's Autobiography presents a remarkable picture of the conditions which favor both the growth and decay of the religious spirit. And to turn to fiction-there are two or three stories by Thomas Nelson Page that reveal how the system of slavery, as old as civilization, succeeded, detestable in its general working though it was, in maintaining its place in the consciences of centuries of good men and women.

Again many books that are by no means immortal have a higher value for us because they are more perfectly adapted to the needs or conditions in which we find ourselves than are the works of another age and another civilization. It is for this reason that many people have learned more from John Halifax, Gentleman, or Silas Marner than from the poetry of Shakespeare or Dante. And for the same reason and because its author does not stand too far above us in intellectual stature, Hamerton's Intellectual Life will prove to most persons at once more interesting and more helpful than Bacon's Advancement of Learning.

But outside of the class of books thus far mentioned, there are thousands of others that satisfy our desire for knowledge upon subjects with which these books do not concern themselves, history in all its forms, science, art

criticism, and much else.

These appeal to interests as legitimate, if not always quite so important, as interest in the conduct of life and in the permanent and central elements in human nature. Reading on such subjects need be neither lazy nor desultory.

Emerson seems to me to be stating an important truth when he claims that the great books, or, I should insist, at any rate, certain of the great books, should form an integral part of the reading of the man of culture, partly because of the importance of their subject matter, partly because of the keen pleasure they may afford through their form and diction, partly again because of the inspiration they give in the midst of the conflicts of life. But to say that they shall form the sole reading is a position which cannot possibly be maintained. See on this subject the sensible essay of A. J. Balfour, The Pleasures of Reading, in Essays and Addresses.

27. See H. W. Mabie, Books and Culture, Chapter II; Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, Part IV, Letter III.

28. See Hamerton, op. cit. Part X, Letter VIII.

CHAPTER V-FRIENDSHIP

One

I. In connection with this question the members of the class may be interested in the testimony as to the value of friendship given by two of the greatest modern students of human life, Francis Bacon and Goethe. For Bacon see the opening paragraph of his Essay on Friendship (No. 27) and, indeed, the entire essay. Goethe in a letter to Frau von Stein (1781) says: “On this moving earth of ours the only sources of joy and peace are true love, the service of our fellows, and science (Wissenschaft, which is probably used here to mean both the intellectual and the aesthetic life)". of the best students of life in our own generation-Philip Gilbert Hamerton- writes in the same strain (Human Intercourse, p. X): "The happiness of sympathetic human intercourse seems to me incomparably greater than any other pleasure. I may be supposed to have passed the age of enthusiastic illusions, yet I would at any time rather pass a week with a real friend in any place that afforded simple shelter than with an indifferent person in a palace. In saying this, I am thinking of real experiences. One of my friends who is devoted to archaeological excavations has often invited me to share his life in a hut or a cottage, and I have invariably found that the pleasure of his society far overbalanced the absence of luxury. On the other hand, I have sometimes endured extreme ennui at sumptuous feasts in richly appointed houses. The result of experience, in my case, has been to confirm a youthful conviction that the value of certain persons is not to be estimated by comparison with anything else."

For a delightful picture of the friendships of some famous persons see Will H. Low in Scribner's Magazine, Vols. 43 and 44, especially the papers that treat of Robert Louis Steven

3. Friendship is (1) useful, so useful indeed as to be indispensable; and (2) it is noble or admirable.

5. An acquaintance is essentially either a person we like for reason 1 or 2, or one whom we admire and respect for his own intrinsic qualities, but whom we have never associated with enough to have become intimate with.

6. It is not complete. And if Aristotle had been able to read the translation of his work which is here given, he would not have considered it an adequate representation of his views. The Greek word areté, which is by all translators rendered virtue, has a far wider meaning than the word virtue as used in modern English. It means rather excellence of any sort, and is so used by Aristotle, as by his fellow Greeks, many times. In his discussion of friendship it stands for every form of personal excellence, strength and keenness and resourcefulness of intellect, breadth of interest, good taste, a happy companionable temperament, and good character, in short for every element of a wellrounded, completely developed personality. The highest happiness consists, according to Aristotle, in the completest and most harmonious development of all our powers and capacities. And it is in the union of men thus developed, who are attracted to each other primarily by admiration for each other's personal qualities, that true friendship consists. Among these qualities, character, as the argument shows, plays the most important part; but the philosopher who has just been devoting an entire book of his treatise (Book VI) to the excellences of intellect, could not for a moment forget or ignore the importance to friendship of other graces and admirable qualities besides the moral.

7. It is notorious that the cowardly may admire the brave, and in general those with weak will may admire those whose will is strong. Hamlet's address to Horatio illustrates this fact. Hamlet is one who tends to let himself drift, even in the most dangerous rapids. Yet he admires above all others the man who is one of those