ng adventure called life;
and those who don't. The second category is much the larger of the two.
Very many people belong to it who think that they belong to the first.
They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive a child. Although
you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of
fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you
up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon
principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have
no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.

And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point
of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of
understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of
imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend.
To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must
divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt
his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take
the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes
of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and
gratitude than five hundred pounds would buy. His notion of real
goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced
participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you
honestly do this, you will be on his side.

* * * * *

Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons
and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents
and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of
knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to
profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general
be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of
goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since
goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret
of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living;
and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!
Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult,
in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.

To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to
imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is