THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



better advantage than your younger rivals. Your ef- 

 fort should bring you more directly to its goal. You 

 should accomplish more in a given time than you could 

 have done at twenty. 



Your chiefest danger, however, is that you have al- 

 lowed your ideas to become fixed, inflexible ; and that 

 you have lost enthusiasm. In that case, you will 

 find yourself at a disadvantage, and you cannot hope 

 to compete with the workers of the younger generation. 

 Should you lose that philosopher's stone called In- 

 terest, you will soon find yourself revolving in a narrow 

 circle, learning nothing new, forgetting rather than ac- 

 quiring. In that event you will soon be outstripped in 

 the race. But if, on the other hand, you do make 

 progress, the amount of that progress granted reason- 

 able natural abilities will depend in no small measure 

 upon the extent to which you keep young in interest 

 and imagination; receptive, energetic, in a word, 

 fresh- vie wed or open-minded. 



To maintain such freshness, then, is obviously one of 

 the most desirable ends of self -culture. He who 

 achieves that end will solve in a measure for himself 

 the old problem of the searchers after the Elixir of Life. 

 The Spring of Eternal Youth, which Ponce de Leon 

 failed to find in his long journeyings, you will have 

 found in your own home, wherever that may chance 

 to be, or, to be accurate, the fountains of prolonged, 

 if not of eternal, youthfulness. 



But how may this alchemistic miracle be accom- 

 plished ? Of a truth, not without heroic effort. Cease- 



