tual and wilful with it than other men, that he grows great. A
man's genius is always at bottom religious, at the point where it is
genius, a worshipping toward something, a worshipping toward something
until he gets it, a supreme covetousness for God, for being a God. It is
a faith in him, a sense of identity and sharing with what seems to be
above and outside, a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said that
all that real teaching is for, is to say to a man, in countless ways, a
countless "You can." And I have said that all real learning is for is to
say "I can." When we have enough great "I can's," there will be a great
society or nation, a glorious "We can" rising to heaven. This is the
ideal that hovers over all real teaching and makes it
deathless,--fertile for ever.

If the world could be stopped short for ten years in its dull, sullen
round of not believing in itself, if it could be allowed to have, all of
it, all over, even for three days, the great solemn joy of letting
itself go, it would not be caught falling back very soon, I think, into
its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the same world for three
hundred years. All that it is going to require to get all people to feel
that they are inspired is some one who is strong enough to lift a few
people off of themselves--get the idea started. Every man is so busy
nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered, that he has
not the slightest idea of what is really inside him, or of what the
thing that is really inside him would do with him, if he would give it a
chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and
the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking
down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted
off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He
knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval,
underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when
he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws,
have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that
a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and worries are
based on defective, uninvoked functions. Some organ, vision, taste, or
feeling or instinct is not allowed its vent, its chance to qualify.
Something needs lifting away. The common experience of sleeping things
off, or walking or working them off, is the daily sym