'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked, and who has
constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and mean
propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he
would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him
from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. Your born
gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being
than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils,"
even though in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic theologians
say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid
under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
something else is good. He who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under
the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by
Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives
the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of
your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the
notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much
through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their
enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty
by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's
inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than
the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social
miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in
lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound
blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the
morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful
intoxicants.

I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I have said
seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so
when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and
apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in
consequence of some of the conceptions I have tried to make more clear.
I cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive,
impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly
free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand
him, then, as such a subtle little piece of mac