tage is essentially dramatic, a
man-judging, man-illuminating power, the power of guessing what other
people are going to think and do.

When the world points out to the young man, as it is very fond of doing,
that he must learn from experience, what it really means is, that he
must learn from his dramatic drill in human life, his contact with real
persons, his slow, compulsory scrupulous going the rounds of his heart,
putting himself in the place of real persons.

Probably every man who lives, in proportion as he covets power or
knowledge, would like to be (at will at least) a kind of focused
everybody. It is true that in his earlier stages, and in his lesser
moods afterward, he would probably seem to most people a somewhat
teetering person, diffused, chaotic, or contradictory. It could hardly
be helped--with the raw materials of a great man all scattered around in
him, great unaccounted-for insights, idle-looking powers all as yet
unfused. But a man in the long run (and longer the better) is always
worth while, no matter how he looks in the making, and it certainly does
seem reasonable, however bad it may look, that this is the way he is
made, that in proportion as he does his knowing spiritually and
powerfully, he will have to do it dramatically. It sometimes seems as if
knowing, in the best sense, were a kind of rotary-person process, a
being everybody in a row, a state of living symposium. The
interpenetrating, blending-in, digesting period comes in due course, the
time of settling down into himself, and behold the man is made, a
unified, concentrated, individual, universal man--a focused everybody.

This is not quite being a god perhaps, but it is as near to it, on the
whole, as a man can conveniently get.

IV

Spiritual Thrift

But perhaps one of the most interesting things about doing up one's
knowing in persons is that it is not only the most alive, but the most
economical knowledge that can be obtained. On the whole, eleven or
twelve people do very well to know the world with, if one can get a
complete set, if they are different enough, and one knows them down
through. The rest of the people that one sees about, from the point of
view of stretching one's comprehension, one's essential sympathy or
knowledge, do not count very much. They are duplicates--to be respected
and to be loved, of course, but to be kept in the cellar of actual
consciousness. There is no other way to do. Everybody was not intende