of ambition, persistence, and
courage. He is master of the rational method of solving the problems
that beset him. He does his work intelligently and effectively. And yet
he has failed to make a good living. Why? Simply because of his standard
of what constitutes a good living. Measured by my standard, he is doing
excellently well. Measured by his own standard, he is a miserable
failure. He is depressed and gloomy and out of harmony with the world,
simply because he has no other standard for a good living than a
financial one. He is by profession a civil engineer. His work is much
more remunerative than is that of many other callings. He has it in him
to attain to professional distinction in that work. But to this
opportunity he is blind. In the great industrial center in which he
works, he is constantly irritated by the evidences of wealth and luxury
beyond what he himself enjoys. The millionaire captain of industry is
his hero, and because he is not numbered among this class, he looks at
the world through the bluest kind of spectacles.

Now, to my mind that man's education failed somewhere, and its failure
lay in the fact that it did not develop in him ideals of success that
would have made him immune to these irritating factors. We have often
heard it said that education should rid the mind of the incubus of
superstition, and one very important effect of universal education is
that it does offer to all men an explanation of the phenomena that
formerly weighted down the mind with fear and dread, and opened an easy
ingress to the forces of superstition and fraud and error. Education has
accomplished this function, I think, passably well with respect to the
more obvious sources of superstition. Necromancy and magic, demonism and
witchcraft, have long since been relegated to the limbo of exposed
fraud. Their conquest has been one of the most significant advances that
man has made above the savage. The truths of science have at last
triumphed, and, as education has diffused these truths among the masses,
the triumph has become almost universal.

But there are other forms of superstition besides those I have
mentioned,--other instances of a false perspective, of distorted values,
of inadequate standards. If belief in witchcraft or in magic is bad
because it falls short of an adequate interpretation of nature,--if it
is false because it is inconsistent with human experience,--then the
worship of Mammon that my engineer fr