nce
that might be useful to you, but the cost is too great. If you are not
dead, you may be crippled for life.

If you are convalescing from typhoid fever, you are likely to have a
ravenous appetite. You feel very well and you derive considerable
pleasure from the milk-toast and soft-boiled eggs you have been getting,
but they do not begin to satisfy you. Every instinct within you calls
for a big piece of juicy beef-steak and fried potatoes. There is no
reason in your experience why you should not gratify your desire--you
may have been told by the doctor that it isn't time for that yet and you
must be content with what is ordered for you. But if you believe in
doing what you feel like and the doctor is out of the way, why not have
your beef-steak? I happen to know of two separate cases where this
occurred--friends of mine. The doctor in each case apparently took too
much for granted and failed to impress upon their minds forcibly enough
the need of obeying his orders rather than their own inclinations. The
experience came too late--because it brought death with it.

Or suppose you are in some out-of-the-way place and are hot and tired
and very thirsty and the only water available comes from a supply which
is not fit to drink? You may have been told this by some one who knows
more about it than you do, but if you believe in ignoring other people's
opinions and thinking only of yourself--and the water is cool and clear
and you feel like drinking it, why shouldn't you? Suppose it turns out
that clear, cool water may be polluted with cholera, or yellow fever, or
other deadly germs? You may never recover from the effects of it.

These are crude, haphazard illustrations of a principle which is
constantly at work in human lives in a great variety of ways. The
obvious meaning of it is that your experience, or your own lack of
experience, in many questions and emergencies may not be enough for you
to go by, or depend upon.

Most young people have had very little experience of many things that
are liable to have a vital bearing on their own lives, their own selves,
their own hope of happiness.

As a matter of fact it must be evident to any one who will reflect a
moment, that no one individual, however long he may have lived, or
however full and varied his life may have been, can possibly have had in
his own personal experience more than a small fraction of the things
that may occur and do keep occurring in the world of human