portunity of expansion in these directions. But he will then have a strong second choice to fall back upon.

And a second choice is with Dame Nature a vitally important thing. It is true that the old theory of the general applicability of human force is untenable. Man power is not steam power, to be applied to a guillotine or a church organ impartially. It must act toward its prescribed ends or not at all. But it is also true that human nature has more than one end toward which it moves; and (a crucial point in this matter) there is in living things a wonderful power of substitution; life that cannot find its way by one channel will often make out marvelously well by another. If the top of a spruce tree is cut off it will make use of one of its higher branches to carry out its natural spire form. Men learn, if necessary, to see with their ears or hear with their sense of touch. Conversely, if a strain is put upon one portion of the human organism, as on the legs or brain, power will be transferred from the rest, and the member under fire will not be permitted to succumb until the resources of the whole have been exhausted.

And so with the total expansion of the vital force. If a preferred method is denied, it will find issue thru such channels as remain. The genius that would have made war its medium will force its way in business. A life denied utterance in music may find it in science or thru the nurturing instinct. Just as the flavor of personality lies in things too subtle to depend upon the road it travels by, so the total genius of the man will somehow arrive so long as any of the main instinctive issues are left open to it.

And each major instinct is itself capable of a great variety of statement. There used to be an artist, familiar to frequenters of European galleries, who painted with his toes. The prehensile and manipulating instincts evidently lie deeper than the separation of the paths which lead to the hands and feet respectively. The building or creative impulse lies deeper still, and appears under a vast variety of forms. Man will sing in wood and stone, or build in sounds. Sir Henry Main says that the Roman law-the great practical system of dealing between man and man, that has survived the test of cen

turies and nations-owes the universal character which has given it currency to the Greek sense of form, derived by the Roman prætors from the Stoic philosophy. This most colossal of the works of common sense is, in its peculiar excellence, one of the world's great monuments of plastic art. Evidently the creative instinct is not easy to defeat.

So the nurturing instinct, which begins from mother love, has worked back from that original utterance until it has permeated our whole nature. We are nurturers now, both sexes, and for every kind of work that deals with the fostering of life. The instinct makes not only teachers, nurses, doctors, farmers, but molders of men in every sort of occupation. A leading banking house I know is in all essentials a kindergarten of young business men, the expression of the mother nature of its head. Even successful generals, like the successful captains of athletic teams, are often affectionately known as “Father or even as "Old Mother So and So."

And so among them the constructive human instincts cover so vast a territory that it is difficult to find a form of occupation wholly outside their scope. Applicable to very drudgery as such, there is, as we have said, the rhythmic instinct-saviour of generations of rowers and runners, of spinners and knitters in the sun, by setting their drudgery to a lullaby. So soothing, indeed, is the purring of routine that it is perhaps more often an allurement than an obstacle.

Even the hunting and fighting instincts are not wholly disappointed in modern industry. Etymology seldom lies, and there must be some reminiscence of the chase in anything named "pursuit." I recently looked up a quotation in Herodotus, and the sort of breathless sensation of following up and finally seizing on the game was not distinguishable from what I experienced a few weeks later in the pursuit of trout. As to the fighting instinct, nature's magnificent blanket clause, applying to obstacles as such-the Hercules of our nature whose delight is in the cussedness of things-some use of this, tho not usually in its aboriginal form, is absolutely certain to

come in.

The legend of Proteus is the story of all men, a little ac

celerated as to time, but rather understated as regards the possible variety of incarnation. The doctors have now adopted the name "proteid" for the very flesh of which our bodies are composed.

And the instincts are not only broad-based: the center of them is always on achievement, on getting the thing done. Nature is of a very practical-of an essentially Philistine or get-there-disposition. The essence of her message is always "Thou shalt arrive." Not to wrestle and strike, but to conquer; not to run and throw and lie in wait, but to bag the game, is the focus of the war and hunting instincts. Complete satisfaction indeed is only where the instinctive end is gained by the instinctive means. But where the choice is between means and end it is always the end that rules. The boy has been pursuing thru all his childish games a phantom stag. In the opportunity of grown-up achievement the real stag comes in sight; and the weight and passion of the instinct will bid him follow wheresoever the chase may lead. There is more real life in making an actual living by tending counter than in pious adherence to the ancient ritual thru breaking and entering, raiding apple stands, or becoming a gentleman sport. Nature is no pedant. Contemporaneousness is of the essence of her law. Up-to-date infraction is more germane to her intention than obsolete fulfilment. So that the very instincts themselves are, in one way, on the side of the boy's submission to whatever actual conditions may impose. They will rather pull him cross lots to the end than take him round by the road that has ceased to lead there.

2. The next thing we must do after preserving the whole nature of the child alive up to the age of adolescence is to precipitate his nature thus preserved in the direction of some kind of work. It is not necessary to train at once for any special trade; the immediate task may be to prepare for the university, deferring specific training for another eight years. What is necessary is that education from this time on shall have a future to it, shall be felt by the child as the beginning of preparation for real life.

There is a characteristic of the adolescent which is of car

dinal importance in this connection, one which all teachers recognize, at least in its more obvious forms. All know, for instance, the big boy of fourteen who hates childish lessons, and can make nothing out of them, but who will wake up and show a manly power to grasp real things if a way of getting hold of real things is opened to him. Partly this change seems the result of a defining or specializing tendency. This is the time when the individual bent begins to declare itself, vaguely or definitely, toward some particular sort of work or in a general direction, according to the extent to which individual bent in a particular case exists.

But chiefly this tendency to specialize is a symptom, or direct result, of a more fundamental change. The great thing that is happening is the shifting of motive from impulse toward particular achievements to a thirst for the achieving life. What has happened is the coming of a future into the child's world. The idea of his own life and place has come to him, and his desire is now toward that. And with the idea of a future comes the vision of the real world in which that future lies. He begins to scrutinize the actual conditions under which his desires and ambitions have got to be wrought out. So that besides the instinctive tendency to specialize there is the perception that he must specialize if he is to be somebody, and the consequent determination to do so. The true explanation of the lout of fourteen back in the sixth grade of the grammar school, and apparently incapable of advance in lessons that the younger children easily learn, is that his heart can no longer respond to childish things, but awaits the call of the reality to which it is attuned. What renders him deaf to the instincts in their childish form, urging him from behind, is the sound of the rapids ahead, among which real deeds are to be done. It is the call of the rapids that must henceforth govern.

And what is the center of this desire to be somebody, to take his place in the real world, to be a man among men? What is it but the gang desire to come up to standard, to pull his weight in the boat, the old gang instinct to make good? The heart of this instinct, as of every other, is not in the

means, but in the end. The gang finds its first and most natural expression in raid and foray; but under all this is the central desire to belong. That there shall be a gang, not that it shall do particular things, was nature's dearest object in laying the foundation of this impulse. And as belonging, not the form of it, is the heart of his desire, so will the boy hold to real membership, under real conditions as they exist, in preference to the observance of any form of membership from which the virtue of actuality has escaped. What he wants is really to belong, to be in it in the grown-up world, to assume the toga virilis, to be admitted into the fellowship and councils, to share the responsibilities and undertakings, of the clan. He would desire that such fellowship should express itself under the form of raid and foray if it could be so, but as between form and substance it is the substance every time that he will choose.

And as he comes to appreciate the fact that making good in the grown-up world involves industrial efficiency-that the game now is the industrial game, and that the industrially incompetent are not really in it-it is the gang instinct itself that impels him to the acquiring of such efficiency, more strongly than any other force could do. He will feel it to be a pity that we can not all be knights and mighty hunters before the Lord, but given the impossibility of being such in earnest, he sees that there is more of real life in tending to business in our plebeian way than in playing at Johnny War after the fashion of aristocratic survivals. Verily the first commandment of the gang spirit, as of the code of manliness in all ages, is: "Thou shalt play the game."

It is at this age that, under the pressure of the gang instinct, boys begin to practise their games in ways that are far from amusing, for the sake of ulterior results, and it is the gang instinct that in the main must carry them thru the drudgery that the acquiring of industrial efficiency involves. The cross-lots power of instinctive impulse is here at its full strength. For the end is now the distant one of the total accomplishment of a life, and the desire is in a measure proportional to the desert spaces that lie between.