lives comes from our material environment. Good clothes, artistic homes,
beautiful pictures and decoration, attractive parks and lawns, well-kept streets,
well-bound books—all these have a direct moral and educative value; on the
other hand, squalor, disorder, and ugliness are an incentive to ignorance and
crime.
Hawthorne tells in "The Great Stone Face" of the boy Ernest, listening to the
tradition of a coming Wise Man who one day is to rule over the Valley. The
story sinks deep into the boy's heart, and he thinks and dreams of the great and
good man; and as he thinks and dreams, he spends his boyhood days gazing
across the valley at a distant mountain side whose rocks and cliffs nature had
formed into the outlines of a human face remarkable for the nobleness and
benignity of its expression. He comes to love this Face and looks upon it as the
prototype of the coming Wise Man, until lo! as he dwells upon it and dreams
about it, the beautiful character which its expression typifies grows into his own
life, and he himself becomes the long-looked-for Wise Man.
The Influence of Personality.—More powerful than the influence of material
environment, however, is that of other personalities upon us—the touch of life
upon life. A living personality contains a power which grips hold of us,
electrifies us, inspires us, and compels us to new endeavor, or else degrades and
debases us. None has failed to feel at some time this life-touch, and to bless or
curse the day when its influence came upon him. Either consciously or
unconsciously such a personality becomes our ideal and model; we idolize it,
idealize it, and imitate it, until it becomes a part of us. Not only do we find these
great personalities living in the flesh, but we find them also in books, from
whose pages they speak to us, and to whose influence we respond.
And not in the great personalities alone does the power to influence reside. From
every life which touches ours, a stream of influence great or small is entering our
life and helping to mold it. Nor are we to forget that this influence is reciprocal,
and that we are reacting upon others up to the measure of the powers that are in
us.
4. THE INSTINCT OF PLAY
Small use to be a child unless one can play. Says Karl Groos: "Perhaps the very
existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not
play because he is young, but he is young because he must play." Play is a