THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 21 
went before ; and the coming age, the next year’s twigs and leaves, 
will be nearer heaven still because we have lived and grown. 
It seems to me that it is as necessary to have text-books and 
guides in a study of self as in any other study. Works on 
psychology do not cover the kind of self-knowledge we are consider- 
ing; but even if such works did they would not supply the want. 
What is needed is a concrete presentation of the facts and pro- 
cesses of human nature. We may learn a good deal about our 
bodies from scientific generalizations, but these cannot take the 
place of a physiological chart, or of actual dissection. To a 
psychological chart we give the name of novel. Ina novel we find 
not generalizations, but people who act as we do, and we find, 
besides, what the author, who isa specialist in this study, believes to 
be the motives that prompted these actions, and we also find what 
he believes to be the effect of these actions on the actors and on 
others. We find there what the author has discovered to be the 
modes of life of the men around him and the ends of life we bave 
practically and virtually before us. He traces and exposes the 
influences that are abroad in the world by showing their effect on 
men and women. We find the results that he has arrived at in this 
science of human nature, and we find them in the form that is most 
easily understood and most effective. He shows us where we are, 
which, as we have noticed above, is the first thing we require 
to know in order to self-realization. And I ask in what other way 
can this be shown ? 
Then in his bad characters he shows us the course of life and 
thought that lead to disaster, or deterioration, or to what is unworthy, 
and here we find what we have to avoid. In his good characters we 
find what courses of life and thought are necessary to development, 
and here we find what we ought to cultivate. 
It seems to me that the greatest need of the day is guidance in 
detail. We have righteousness preached at us, but we want to know 
what righteousness is when translated into the next act that we have 
to perform, or into the customary acts of our lives. We want to 
know what is better and worthier than what we are doing, and if 
this could once be shown, I have sufficient confidence in human 
nature to believe that a majority would try to follow it. This 
guidance can be given in a novel more directly than in any other 
way, and for this reason it is an essential supplement to treatises or 
