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Rh or even roughening them by a few burrs with a chisel. Having at length grasped the lump and put it on the fire, you begin to read; but, before you have got through the first column, you are reminded, by the changes of position which your sensations prompt, that men still fail to make easy-chairs. And yet the guiding principle is simple enough. Just that advantage secured by using a soft seat in place of a hard one—the advantage, namely, of spreading over a larger area the pressure of the weight to be borne, and so making the pressure less intense at any one point—is an advantage to be sought in the form of the chair. Ease is to be gained by making the shapes and relative inclinations of seat and back such as will evenly distribute the weight of the trunk and limbs over the widest possible supporting surface, and with the least straining of the parts out of their natural attitudes. And yet only now, after these thousands of years of civilization, are there being reached (and that not rationally but empirically) approximations to the structure required.

Such are the experiences of the first hour; and so they continue all the day through. If you watch and criticise, you may see that the immense majority bring to bear, even on those actions which it is the business of their lives to carry on effectually, an extremely small amount of faculty. Get a workman to do something for you that is more or less new, and not the clearest explanations and sketches will prevent him from blundering; and, to any expression of surprise, he will reply that he was not brought up to it: scarcely ever betraying the slightest shame in confessing that he cannot do a thing he was not taught to do. Similarly throughout the higher grades of activity. Remember how generally improvements in manufactures come from outsiders, and you are at once shown with what mere unintelligent routine manufactures are commonly carried on. Examine into the management of mercantile concerns, and you perceive that those engaged in them mostly do nothing more than move in the ruts that have gradually been made for them by the process of trial and error during a long succession of generations. Indeed, it almost seems as though most men made it their aim to get through life with the least possible expenditure of thought.

How, then, can there be looked for such power of self-guidance as, in the absence of inherited authoritative rules, would require them to understand why, in the nature of things, these modes of action are injurious and those modes beneficial—would require them to pass beyond proximate results, and see clearly the involved remote results as worked out on self, on others, and on society?

The incapacity need not, indeed, be inferred; it may be seen, if we do but take an action concerning which the sanctified code is silent. Listen to a conversation about gambling; and, where reprobation is expressed, note the grounds of the reprobation. That it tends toward the ruin of the gambler; that it risks the welfare of family and friends;