o
that until he does respect it himself, respecting it for him is the only
thing that any one else can do--the beginning and end of all action for
him and of all knowledge. Democracy to-day in education--as in
everything else--is facing its supreme opportunity. Going about in the
world respecting men until they respect themselves is almost the only
practical way there is of serving them.

We find it necessary to believe that any man in this present day who
shall be inspired to respect his life, who shall refuse to take to
himself the things that do not belong to his life, who shall break with
the appearance of things, who shall rejoice in the things that are
really real to him--there shall be no withstanding him. The strength of
the universe shall be in him. He shall be glorious with it. The man who
lives down through the knowledge that he has, has all the secret of all
knowledge that he does not have. The spirit that all truths are known
with, becomes his spirit. The essential mastery over all real things and
over all real men is his possession forever.

When this vital and delighted knowledge--knowledge that is based on
facts--one's own self-respecting experience with facts, shall begin
again to be the habit of the educated life, the days of the Dead Level
of Intelligence shall be numbered. Men are going to be the embodiment of
the truths they know--some-time--as they have been in the past. When the
world is filled once more with men who know what they know, learning
will cease to be a theory about a theory of life, and children will
acquire truths as helplessly and inescapably as they acquire parents.
Truths will be learned through the types of men the truths have made. A
man was meant to learn truths by gazing up and down lives--out of his
own life.

When these principles are brought home to educators--when they are
practised in some degree by the people, instead of merely, as they have
always been before, by the leaders of the people, the world of knowledge
shall be a new world. All knowledge shall be human, incarnate,
expressive, artistic. Whole systems of knowledge shall come to us by
seeing one another's faces on the street.

XI

The Art of Reading as One Likes

Most of us are apt to discover by the time we are too old to get over
it, that we are born with a natural gift for being interested in
ourselves. We realise in a general way, that our lives are not very
important--that they are being lived on a