When a Man Comes to Himself

Woodrow Wilson
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.
President of the United States

1901.





I

It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes
when he "comes to himself." It is not only after periods of
recklessness or infatuation, when has played the spendthrift or the
fool, that a man comes to comes to himself. He comes to himself
after experiences of which he alone may be aware: when he has left
off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and
with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared
his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and
function in it.

It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away.
He sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers
must act, as well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier
prepossessions about the world of men and affairs, both those which
were too favorable and those which were too unfavorable--both those
of the nursery and those of a young man's reading. He has learned