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reflection of their surroundings. Such persons waste time in

drinking, card-playing, or some other form of dissipation. It was
announced during the late financial depression, that a certain
man had failed. No, that is impossible, said the president of
a large corporation; his character and will-power are worth a
million dollars, and I shall gladly employ him if he will come
to me. Again, character demands that any desirable line of
ideas should be kept before the mind until they dominate it. A
person can have individuality only along some given line, which
implies long continued study and much mental concentration.
The self is a bundle of such mental states as persist, and recur
again and again. Where there is no capacity for continuous, and
continually recurring, mental states, there can be no individuality,
no persistent self, no fixed character. Rattle-brained persons,
gossips, and other fickle creatures cannot be properly said to
have any individual self. Nor will anyone acquire individuality
by now studying a little mathematics, or astronomy, or geology,
now skimming over a few selections of English or French
literature, now beginning the study of German or drawing, but
stopping the moment it becomes hard, the moment it begins
to build up real individuality. It is the function of a well-trained
will to adhere to a given line of conduct or ideas, until they have
become an integral part of the self. Only those ideas which are
so absorbed become valuable elements of the character. We
are coins, the metal of which has been dug from the mines of
our inborn intellectual and moral faculties by Will-Power. If we
properly work these mines, we may find metal enough in us to
justify a stamp of very high value. On the other hand, though
there is much unmined metal beneath the surface, we often
form a character marked with a penny stamp. It may be true
that circumstances stamp us to a certain extent, but it is also
true that the way in which we use them stamps us indelibly.
Let us now proceed to a consideration of the methods
whereby one may develop the mechanism of the mind so as
to allow the current of the Will to flow freely through it, as the
Will Development