cessful Temperament.

Success has become a spiritual institution. In other words, the hour of
the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the man who sees how, the
man of The Successful Temperament is at hand.

Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this
day--must reckon with him--with the Man Who Sees How.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT

I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success."

I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that
ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great
Men with all their funny trappings on,--their hoods, and their ribbons,
and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great
Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their
voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows
of Prosperity from the street.

And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb
in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of
The Little Great go by.

I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my
heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own
side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing
faintly in my ears have gone my way.

But I keep coming back to the curb again.

I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt
carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans
or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes,
the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented,
gurgling, wallowing millionaires--I cannot help standing once more and
looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who
may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking.
I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or
humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than
they can help, and are trying to do better.

They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it
again and again.

They are the great men.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get
himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make
success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes
failure express it.

But this boo