go in search of experience, Socrates said,
would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that
none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch
life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to
place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get
nothing.

Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be
always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come
to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the
oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New
Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of
marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.

* * * * *

The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.
For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near
losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.
Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a
certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity
always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room
hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu
carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a
prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined
elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows
them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that
Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who
cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious
smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by
imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus
proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom
will die with them.

This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set
Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very
shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him
as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented
moonshine gone to seed, and these things, proportioned ill, drive men
transverse.

Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it
does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived
wholly in a