Title:  When a Man Comes to Himself

Author:  Woodrow Wilson

Release Date:  February, 2004 [EBook #5078] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 16, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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When a Man Comes to Himself

Woodrow Wilson
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D. 
President of the United States

1901.

I

It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes when he “comes to himself.”  It is not only after periods of recklessness or infatuation, when has played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man comes to comes to himself.  He comes to himself after experiences of which he alone may be aware:  when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it.

It is a process of disillusionment.  The scales have fallen away.  He sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must act, as well as what his powers are.  He has got rid of earlier prepossessions about the world of men and affairs, both those which were too favorable and those which were too unfavorable—­both those of the nursery and those of a young man’s reading.  He has learned his own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair way to learn them; has found his footing and the true nature of the “going” he must look for in the world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to make his running, and at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal lies, and what cheer he may expect by the way.  It is a process of disillusionment, but it disheartens no soundly made man.  It brings him into a light which guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does not make the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit for use in the open, but which shines wholesomely, rather upon the obvious path, like the honest rays of the frank sun, and makes traveling both safe and cheerful.

II

There is no fixed time in a man’s life at which he comes to himself, and some man never come to themselves at all.  It is a change reserved for the thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach themselves from tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and again, a view of the proportions of life and of the stage and plot of its action.  We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste