can an insatiable mind. No doubt the highest
form of this noble curiosity is that which leads us,
without self-interest, to look abroad upon all the
field of man’s life at home and in society,
seeking more excellent forms of government, more righteous
ways of labor, more elevating forms of art, and which
makes the greater among us statesmen, reformers, philanthropists,
artists, critics, men of letters. It is certainly
human to mind your neighbor’s business as well
as your own. Gossips are only sociologists upon
a mean and petty scale. The art of being human
lifts to be a better level than that of gossip; it
leaves mere chatter behind, as too reminiscent of a
lower stage of existence, and is compassed by those
whose outlook is wide enough to serve for guidance
and a choosing of ways.
Luckily we are not the first human beings. We
have come into a great heritage of interesting things,
collected and piled all about us by the curiousity
of past generations. And so our interest is selective.
Our education consists in learning intelligent choice.
Our energies do not clash or compete: each is
free to take his own path to knowledge. Each has
that choice, which is man’s alone, of the life
he shall live, and finds out first or last that the
art in living is not only to be genuine and one’s
own master, but also to learn mastery in perception
and preference. Your true woodsman needs not
to follow the dusty highway through the forest nor
search for any path, but goes straight from glade
to glade as if upon an open way, having some privy
understanding with the taller trees, some compass in
his senses. So there is the subtle craft in finding
ways for the mind, too. Keep but your eyes alert
and your ears quick, as you move among men and among
books, and you shall find yourself possessed at last
of a new sense, the sense of the pathfinder.
Have you never marked the eyes of a man who has seen
the world he has lived in: the eyes of the sea-captain,
who has watched his life through the changes of the
heavens; the eyes of the huntsman, nature’s
gossip and familiar; the eyes of the man of affairs,
accustomed to command in moments of exigency?
You are at once aware that they are eyes which can
see. There is something in them that you do not
find in other eyes, and you have read the life of
the man when you have divined what it is. Let
the thing serve as a figure. So ought alert interest
in the world of men and thought to serve each one
of us that we shall have the quick perceiving vision,
taking meanings at a glance, reading suggestions as
if they were expositions. You shall not otherwise
get full value of your humanity. What good shall
it do you else that the long generations of men which
have gone before have filled the world with great
store of everything that may make you wise and your
life various? Will you not take the usury of the
past, if it may be had for the taking? Here is
the world humanity has made: will you take full
citizenship in it, or will you live in it as dull,
as slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the idlers
for whom civilization has no uses, or the deadened
toilers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts the door
on choice?
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