sight into the nature of reason or self-consciousness which I tried to explain to you in my last letter. The self is an "identity pervading its own distinctions." The true self in each man is identical with the true self in all other men, and this universal self is the divine self, "the Christ in man which is the hope of glory." The divine self, however, is transcendent as well as immanent, or, to borrow the apostolic statement, the God who is in all and through all is also over all. Spiritual development is increasing participation in His eternal thought and will. Spiritual death is separation from Him. Activity is the initial manifestation of the indwelling divinity, just as faith is the initial form of union between the immanent and the transcendent selfhood.

In the light of this truth the first term of each triad becomes transparent. Life is the unconscious totality of being; activity its germinal manifestation; presentiment the witness of its presence; identity the statement of its undifferentiated simplicity; unity the disclosure of its oneness with the all; wholeness or universality the definition of its ideal nature; child of Nature the expression of its limitation and its affiliation with those lower orders

of being wherein the universal reason sleeps and dreams. With these solutions of the first term of each triad you can easily unfold the other terms yourself, and I will only ask you now to keep clearly in mind the thought of life as that energetic wholeness and fullness of being which never during the term of our mortal existence rises into complete consciousness. We are more than we know, and we know more than we do. "The soul is essentially active; the activity of which we are conscious is but a part of our total activity, and voluntary activity is but a part of our conscious activity." Our conscious and voluntary lives are therefore merely island peaks rising out of the depths of an unconscious ocean of being. Life is deeper, richer, fuller than conscious thought and will-it is the infinite obscure which eternity must illumi

nate.

According to Emerson, the Chinese sage Mencius perceived that man's chief duty was "to nourish well his vast flowing vigor." "I beg to ask what you call vast flowing vigor?" said his companion. "The explanation," replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely great and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly

and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth." *

The greatest achievement of science has been the reduction of Nature to a torrent of force. In the inorganic world this force appears variously as light, heat, magnetism, and electricity. In the organic world it manifests itself as life. Philosophy resolves this torrent of force into a torrent of will. Energy of life means that the individual soul is flooded with this mysterious torrent, fed with abundant supplies from the inexhaustible fountain of originality and power. Love is energy of life in the form of feeling; genius is energy of life in the form of intellect; heroism is energy of life in the form of will. No wonder, therefore, that each mother's heart throbs with joy as she beholds in her infant that ceaseless movement which is the primal revelation of an unconscious fullness of life; no wonder that her deepest impulse is to nourish well this "vast flowing vigor." "In the beginning is the act." From the act proceed feeling and thought. To the act they return and with deeds fired by feeling and illuminated by thought the circle of development becomes complete.

*Emerson's Essays, second series, p. 75.

Strangely enough, while the nurture of life is a deep maternal impulse, the average mother is too often faithless to its promptings, and many of the worst mistakes in nursery education can only be avoided by lifting into consciousness the ideal latent in instinct and revealed by Froebel in his Play with the Limbs. The child is restless and fretful because he is idle. Instantly the mother or nurse begins to divert and amuse him. She tells a story, sings a song, acts a pantomime, builds a block house, sets in orderly procession the animals belonging to a Noah's ark./Instead of leading the child to do, she does for him, and thus fosters idleness, exactingness, and the craving for passive amusement. Since all passive pleasures create a keener appetite, and since they themselves can only sate and cloy but never satisfy, it is evident that in making the child dependent upon them the mother is sowing seeds of misery for him and for herself. Universal laws can never be broken with impunity, and the universal and inexorable law of habit is that all sensations pall with repetition, while all activities augment their joy.

There are two forms of sloth. One is the inertia of a phlegmatic nature; the other is the instabil

The outcome of the

ity of a frivolous nature.

former is that sullenness of character which repels affection; the outcome of the latter is that selfish exactingness which wears out affection. Dante has branded both types of sluggishness in his Inferno, showing us on the one hand the sullen souls immersed in mire, and on the other the caitiff train of the pleasure seekers chasing forever the whirling banner of change, goaded forever by the hornets and gadflies of capricious impulse and petty vexation.

In the beginning of life inertia and frivolity are mere tendencies with which it is comparatively easy to cope. They are enemies whom the soul may meet and vanquish in an open field. Grant them time and they intrench themselves in the stronghold of habit, and make the soul their captive. I do not say that for this captive there is no escape. I say only that by failure to incite the child to battle the mother exposes him to a weary siege, and since his power diminishes as his chains are forged, her feeble indulgence must indefinitely increase the stress of his conflict and postpone in exact proportion the hour of victory.

As I write I hear your protest. It is easy to