IN A PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY

One is indeed all things to all men in a laboratory. At one moment you find yourself a howling mob, emitting fiendish yells, and explosive laughter, starting in belligerent attitudes hammer

It is a very painful fact in human experience that each of us must go over the same old ground of mental develop struggle and development. To be sure it is a reflection old as the hills but it is still new for I have just rediscovered it. The worst of it is, that the recognition of it as fact is of no value.

I know perfectly well that I will hold some time in the future the same opinions in large measure that I have just been combating. I know perfectly well that when my oponent of was my age he held mine and yet I cannot spare myself the intervening pain and struggle.

I know I will believe, but as I don’t believe there is no help in that. Sometimes I fiercely and defiantly declare that I won’t believe neither now nor in the future. “Be still you fool” then says my mocking other self, “why struggle, you must submit sooner or later to be ground in the same mill with your fellows. The path is straight before you can but choose to follow. Why waste your strength in useless cries? Be still, it is inevitable”

Was there ever an age which those living in and writing about it did not characterize as an age of transition. They always announce the fact as if it were something new, and peculiar to their own age time.

The position is eminently illogical. From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced with a flourish of trumpets.