20 ; JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
the highest good ? It is to develop into actuality all the possibilities 
of our natures. The highest in life means the highest in every 
thought and action, the purest in every motive and feeling. To 
attain this three things are necessary : 
(a) We must know where we stand now—we must have self 
knowledge. ‘ 
(b) We must know what courses of thought and conduct lead 
to deterioration so that we can avoid them. 
(c) We must know what feelings, thoughts and actions are great, 
so that we may cultivate them. How are we to attain this 
knowledge? Any one who is a great student of human nature 
knows how very rare anything like adequate self-knowledge is ; most 
of us are perhaps more ignorant of self than of anything else within 
the range of our experience, and no one, at this stage of the world’s 
progress, can lay claim to a full knowledge of himself. We are 
perpetually congratulating ourselves that our actions and motives are 
magnanimous when they cannot possibly be anything but short- 
sightedly selfish. We are continually practicing deception on our- 
selves and we never suspect it. We do not realize the narrowness of 
our conceptions of what is highest. We do not try to recognize in 
their incipiency the tendencies and habits that will soon become too 
firmly set to be altered. Socrates revolutionized philosophy with 
his “‘ Know Thyself,” and I believe that it will have to be 
recognized that this self-knowledge is as essential to moral progress 
as it ever was to intellectual. How shall we attain it? You say, 
Study yourself. Yes; but suppose I should come to you and 
express a desire to know all about astronomy you would not say to 
me, Go and study the stars. If I wished to know all about geology 
you would not say, Study the ground. You would say to me, Put 
yourself under the best masters and get the best text-books and you 
will then find out all that the study of ages has established, and you 
will be in a position to make fresh advances. You would tell me 
that unaided I could not in a life-time hope to arrive at anything 
comparable to the fulluess of knowledge possessed by a modern 
schoolboy. The world advances because one age starts where the 
last left off. The ancient Norsemen had this idea when they compared 
life to a tre2 called Ygdrasil, which is growing age by age. We are 
among the clouds, not so much on account of what we have done, 
as because we are supported by, and grow out of, all the life that 
