ly go through
an elementary course of mental science without wishing to learn more,
and being lifted to a higher plane. The weak point in the average
person is a tendency to sink into the commonplace, because the
consciousness of not being brilliant induces timidity, and timidity
leads to giving up effort and accepting a fancied impossibility of
development which from being supposed, assumed, and not disturbed,
becomes in the end real.

On the other hand the strong point of the average person is very often
common sense, that singular, priceless gift which gives a touch of
likeness among those who possess it in all classes, high or low--in
the sovereign, the judge, the ploughman, or the washerwoman, a
likeness that is somewhat like a common language among them and makes
them almost like a class apart. Minds endowed with common sense are an
aristocracy among the "average," and if this quality of theirs is
lifted above the ordinary round of business and trained in the domain
of thought it becomes a sound and wide practical judgment. It will
observe a great sobriety in its dealings with the abstract; the
concrete is its kingdom, but it will rule the better for having its
ideas systematized, and its critical power developed. Self-diffidence
tends to check this unduly, and it has to be strengthened in
reasonably supporting its own opinion which is often instinctively
true, but fails to find utterance. It is a help to such persons if
they can learn to follow the workings of their own mind and gain
confidence in their power to understand, and find some intellectual
interest in the drudgery which in every order of things, high or low,
is so willingly handed over to their good management. These results
may not be showy, but it is a great thing to strengthen an "average"
person, and the reward of doing so is sometimes the satisfaction of
seeing that average mind rise in later years quite above the average
and become a tower of steady reflection; while to itself it is a new
life to gain a view of things as a whole, to find that nothing stands
alone, but that the details which it grasps in so masterly a manner
have their place and meaning in the scheme of the universe.

It is evident that even this elementary knowledge cannot be given in
the earliest years of the education of girls, and that it is only
possible to attempt it in schools and school-rooms where they can be
kept on for a longer time of study. Every year that can be ad