starlit expanse loses its
sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers
their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its
solemn mystery.

Those powers within us which are directly related to conduct, the
impulses to self-preservation, and to the propagation of the race, are
subject to the law of education, not less than our physical and
intellectual endowments. And the importance of dealing rightly with
these powers is readily perceived if we reflect that conduct is the
greater part of human life, which is a life of thought and love, of hope
and faith, of imagination and desire.

As we can educate the faculties of thought and imagination, so can we
develop the power to love, to hope, to believe, and to desire. When
there is question of the intellect, teachers seek to impart information
rather than to strengthen the mind, and when there is question of the
moral nature, they have recourse to precepts and maxims instead of
striving to confirm the will and to direct impulse. It is generally
held, in fact, that will is a gift, not a growth, and the same view is
taken of all our moral dispositions. We are supposed to receive from
Nature a warm or a cold heart, a hopeful or a despondent temper, a
believing or a skeptical turn of mind, a spiritual or a sensual bent.
Now as I have already admitted, endowments are unlike; but what has this
to do with the drift of the argument? Minds, though by nature unequal,
may all be educated; and so wills may be educated, and so that which
makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth,
strengthened, and refined. Emerson, whose thought is predominantly
spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties,
confusing strength of will with health. "Courage," he says, "is the
degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... When one has a
plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." But will is a moral
rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it
may be cultivated and directed to noble aims and ends. And if the
teacher perform this work with fine knowledge and tact, he becomes an
educator; for upon the will, more than upon the intellectual faculties,
success or failure depends. Whatever we are able to will, we are able to
learn to do; and the best service we can render another is to rouse and
confirm within him the will to live and to work, that he may make
himself a complete man, that