Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/558



of a joiner? It is because human society is not a factory, but a field; not a mechanical unity, but a vital unity; not made of wheels, but made of people. What is needed in our day, as never before, is not new social machinery, but new personality, more wisdom, sanity, patience, light, capacity to control the already elaborate mechanism of the time; and without these traits the wheels will soon run down and the work be undone, and the workers be smitten with despair; and the children of the kingdom will find themselves good people indeed, but not good seed, fit for the field of the modern world.—, "The Religious Education Association," 1904.

(2357)

PERSONALITY, INFLUENCE OF

Marian Bonsall, who was sent to Japan by The Housekeeper to prepare a series of articles on the home life of that country, writes as follows of the Empress:

American women read with interest and admiration of the active part taken by the Empress in Red Cross work during the war, and of how she spent many hours out of her days in making bandages. The effect of these bandages upon the wounded soldiers has been of deep interest to medical and scientific men, for the soldiers honored by them seemed to rally under a peculiar mental influence. All other bandages were destroyed after their first use; those made by the Empress were sterilized and used again for the simple reason of their effect on the recovery of the soldiers.

The Empress used to go personally to the hospitals many times, and visit among the wounded. One of the servants of a friend of mine in Tokyo, told her of his inability to speak when as a wounded soldier he had lain in an army hospital and had been addrest by the Empress. Tho she was so wondrously kind and gracious he could not thank her, and even had he been able, he said, he knew no words sufficiently polite. Then he added proudly, "The Empress could not speak to every one, but the soldiers are her children."

(2358)

PERSONALITY IS A MYSTERY

Science hath measured man in part; in the laboratory, science points to an analysis of a man weighing a hundred and fifty pounds. In one jar are ten or twelve quarts of water, in another jar the lime, the ash, the carbon, the phosphates, and then a tiny vial holding a little iodin, and a little phosphorus. But that row of jars containing all the elements of the body must not be labeled man. Beyond those jars is a certain immeasurable element, an impalpable something, an invisible essence, a secret spirit, a hidden power, that is fenced about with bones and sinews, but that will suddenly compel you to laugh, to love, to burn with moral indignation, and will spread out before you a canvas and dim your eyes with tears; that will wave a wonder-working wand woven of words, and show you an imperial palace built yonder upon foundations of clouds, and then with a stroke dissolve all, and leave not a wrack behind. These twelve jars, analyzed by science, can not write poems or paint pictures, or carve altars, or enact laws, or sing lullabies, or create a Christmas tree.—

(2359)

PERSONALITY, LOCATION OF

A writer in The Atlantic Monthly says:

The spinal cord runs along the back, with all its ganglia; the weight of the brain is well behind; yet we are not there. In other words, the curious thing is that we feel ourselves to be, not in the region where impressions are received and answered in the brain, and spinal cord, but where they first meet the nerve-extremities. We seem to inhabit not the citadel, but the outer walls. At the point of peripheral expansion of the nerves of sense, where the outer forces begin to be apprehended by us as inner—"in front," where the fingers feel, and the nose smells and the eyes see—there, if anywhere, we find ourselves to be.

I have often been interested to notice whereabouts on our bodily surface another animal looks to find us. The man or even the little child, looks at the face. Is it because the voice issues thence? Yet it is the eyes, rather than the mouth that is watched. Is it because the expression, the signal-station for the changing moods, is there more than elsewhere? A dog, also, invariably looks up into the face. So does a bird, nothwithstanding the fact that the food comes from the hand. Why does he not consider the "I," so far as his needs are concerned, to lie in the part that feeds him? But no; he cocks his head to one side, and directs his lustrous little eye straight to our own, in order to establish what communion