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starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its solemn mystery. Those powers within us which are directly related to conduct, the impulses to self-preservation, and to the propagation of the race, are subject to the law of education, not less than our physical and intellectual endowments. And the importance of dealing rightly with these powers is readily perceived if we reflect that conduct is the greater part of human life, which is a life of thought and love, of hope and faith, of imagination and desire. As we can educate the faculties of thought and imagination, so can we develop the power to love, to hope, to believe, and to desire. When there is question of the intellect, teachers seek to impart information rather than to strengthen the mind, and when there is question of the moral nature, they have recourse to precepts and maxims instead of striving to confirm the will and to direct impulse. It is generally held, in fact, that will is a gift, not a growth, and the same view is taken of all our moral dispositions. We are supposed to receive from Nature a warm or a cold heart, a hopeful or a despondent temper, a believing or a skeptical turn of mind, a spiritual or a sensual bent. Now as I have already admitted, endowments are unlike; but what has this to do with the drift of the argument? Minds, though by nature unequal, may all be educated; and so wills may be educated, and so that which makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth, strengthened, and refined. Emerson, whose thought is predominantly spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties, confusing strength of will with health. "Courage," he says, "is the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... When one has a plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." But will is a moral rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it may be cultivated and directed to noble aims and ends. And if the teacher perform this work with fine knowledge and tact, he becomes an educator; for upon the will, more than upon the intellectual faculties, success or failure depends. Whatever we are able to will, we are able to learn to do; and the best service we can render another is to rouse and confirm within him the will to live and to work, that he may make himself a complete man, that
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