form my own convictions and judge
men and religion on their merits." The subconscious self will still
operate, but its extravagances will be checked by reason and will.

Age can say to itself: "It is true that all that has happened in the
past is part of my experience, and therefore of me. I have formed
certain conclusions from what I have observed, but the data on which I
have formed them are constantly changing. The moment that I cease to be
able to accept and pass into my own experience new factors which my past
would reject as unpleasant or untrue I have become stereotyped in
prejudice and the truth of actuality is no longer in me, and when touch
with the world is lost the only alternative is retirement or disaster."

The more quickly youth breaks away from the prejudices of its
surroundings, the more rapid will be its success. The harder that age
fights against prepossessions, born of the past, which gather round to
obstruct the free operation of its mind, the longer will be the period
of a happy, successful, and active life.

Prejudice is a mixture of pride and egotism, and no prejudiced man,
therefore, will be happy.

XIV

CALM

The last two essays have dealt with the more depressing sides of
practical life--the sudden tempest which sweeps down on the business
man, or the long period of depression which is the necessary prelude to
the times in which optimism is justified. But it is on the note of
optimism, and not of pessimism, that I would conclude, and after the
storm comes the calm. What is calm to the man of experience in affairs?
It is the end to which turbulent and ambitious youth should devote
itself in order that it may attain to happiness in that period of
middle-age which still gives to assured success its real flavour. Youth
is the time of hope; old age is the time for looking back on the
pleasures and achievements of the past--when success or failure may seem
matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands
between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or
failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to
adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call
to him--Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success is already his, and
it will be his own fault if he does not achieve happiness as well.

Successful middle-age appears to me to be the ideal of practical men. I
have tried to indicate the method by which it can be at