ne. If very many individuals think thus, there will soon be a great
whole uniting into a single, close-knit power. If, on the contrary,
each one, excluding himself, relies on the rest and relinquishes the
affair to others, then there are no others at all, for, even though
combined, all remain just as they were before. Make it on the
spot--this resolution! Do not say, "Yet a little more sleep, a
little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep," until,
perchance, improvement shall come of itself. It will never come of
itself. He who has once missed the opportunity of yesterday, when
clear perception would have been easier, will not be able to make
up his mind today, and will certainly be even less able to do so
tomorrow. Every delay only makes us still more inert and but lulls us
more and more into gentle acquiescence to our wretched plight. Neither
could the external stimulations to reflection ever be stronger and
more insistent, for surely he whom these present conditions do not
arouse has lost all feeling. You have been called together to make
a last, determined resolution and decision--not by any means to give
commands and mandates to others, or to depute others to do the work
for you. No, my purpose is to urge you to do the work yourself. In
this connection that idle passing of resolutions, the will to will,
some time or other, are not sufficient, nor is it enough to remain
sluggishly satisfied until self-improvement sets in of its own
accord. On the contrary, from you is demanded a determination which
is identical with action and with life itself, and which will continue
and control, unwavering and unchilled, until it gains its goal.

Or is perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of
purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished
within you? Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow
shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or
dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise
and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead? Long
since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation and repeated
under every guise, that this is very nearly its condition. Its
spokesmen have believed that this was declared merely in insult, and
have regarded themselves as challenged to return the insults, thinking
that thus the affair would resume its natural course. As for the rest,
there was not the slightest trace