with learning how to do and to be what others have been and have done before us. We come abreast of our predecessors by imitating them, and are grateful to the masters when they reveal to us their secrets, to the older men when they give us the benefit of their experience. But presently we discover that the world is changing around us, and that the secrets of the masters and the experience of our elders do not wholly suffice—much though they aid us—to establish us effectively in our younger world. We discover within us needs, aspirations, powers of which the generation that educated us seems unaware, or towards which it appears to be indifferent, unsympathetic, or even actively hostile. We perceive gradually or with successive shocks of surprise that many things which our fathers declared were true and satisfactory are not at all satisfactory, are by no means true, for us. Then it dawns upon us, perhaps as an exhilarating opportunity, perhaps as a grave and sobering necessity, that in a little while we ourselves shall be the elders, the responsible generation. Our salvation in the day when we take command will depend, we are constrained to believe, upon our disentanglement from the lumber of heirlooms and hereditary devices, and upon the discovery and free wise use of our own faculties. The vital part of education begins in the hour when consciousness of self-dependence breaks upon the mind. That is the hour for Emerson.
He appeals to unfolding minds because he is pro-
