advantageous, and each act helpfully reactive. Accordingly the aim at
self-development regularly attends self-direction. I could not,
therefore, properly discuss my last topic without in some measure
anticipating this. Every ideal of action, I was obliged to say,
includes within it an aim at some sort of betterment of the actor. Our
business, then, in the present chapter is not to announce a new theme,
but simply to render explicit what before was implied. We must detach
from action the influence which it throws back upon us, the actors. We
must make this influence plain, exhibit its method, and show wherein
it differs from other processes in some respects similar.



II

The most obvious fact about self-development is that it is a species
of change, and that change is associated with sadness. Heraclitus, the
weeping philosopher of the Greeks, discovered this fact five hundred
years before Christ. "Nothing abides," he said, "all is fleeting." We
stand in a moving tide, unable to bathe twice in the same stream;
before we can stoop a second time the flood is gone. In every age this
is the common theme of lamentation for poet, moralist, common man and
woman. All other causes of sadness are secondary to it. As soon as we
have comprehended anything, have fitted it to our lives and learned to
love it, it is gone.

Such is the aspect which change ordinarily presents. It is tied up
with grief. We regard what is precious as stable; and yet we are
obliged to confess that nothing on earth is stable--nothing among
physical things, and just as little among mental and spiritual things.