Bulwer in "The Coming Race," told, as it came to him, his story of heights to be attained by man, investing them with a wealth of color that only a novelist's imagination could conceive and draw. Bellamy, in "Looking Backward," gave us one from another standpoint. Both presented us with man emancipated from strife, envy, pride, vanity and greed. Novelists deal often with a Real they do not comprehend. Imagination is creative, but the secret wires that bind it to the Unseen carry the substance out of which are fashioned ideals to be wrought. They who cultivate the imagination, as these writers have done, may write and speak prophetically, even though they may not present every detail with the exactness or completeness the future shall reveal.

As one studies man's unfoldment during the centuries past, he will find that novelists and poets have foretold much of what was to come. Who, in Shakespeare's time, could have interpreted Puck's "I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes?" And who is so wise that he can comprehend and intelligently tell to man to-day all that Schiller felt when he wrote in "Wilhelm Tell" - "Seid einig - einig - einig" (Be united - united - united); and Robert Browning hinted at what a complete man might be in:

"Finds progress man's distinctive mark alone,

Not God's, and not the beast's;

God is, they are,

Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."

Long ago we were told that Pontius Pilate asked "What is Truth?" Was the question an intuitional breathing? Sermon after sermon has been written on this text. These honest, right-thinking men, who made this their text, doubtless believed what they wrote: but there was not and is not unanimity of opinion. They differed and differ widely, and yet not for controversy. Each wrote and each writes to-day from his plane of unfoldment - he could do, he can do no more than that. Truth is the unchangeable, - the absolute. Our conceptions of it can never be beyond our own plane of evolution or progression. Students in psychology and philosophy to-day are growing less dogmatic - they are now honest searchers for truth. In natural as in mental science, experiments are being made, and each discovery lifts man one step higher toward his possible goal.

In a general way we have noted all this. We have noted of late wonderful unfoldment and grasp displayed by our young students in the preparatory schools before completing the studies required to enter college. We have attributed it to better methods of teaching, or more faithful application on the part of the student. In part, both are true. But back of all there is a subtle something overlooked, and that is the basic cause. By our methods of teaching and studying, teacher and student have learned better how to call forth the faculties of the mind. By these, memory has been strengthened, the sensibilities have been intensified, and perception has been quickened and made more clear and accurate. In developing the arm muscle, the physical trainer does not devote all his attention to the arm. He knows the bearing every muscle in the system has upon the arm. He has attained this knowledge by tests; and the wonderful work now being done by many of these physical trainers is making Samsons in our very midst. Teachers in the mental field are fast becoming students in psychology; but it seems to me that that great laboratory has as yet only opened to inquirers its outer doors.

Memory, logic and reason are the tools one uses to master a study. The compartment of memory in the mind contains facts learned. Dr. Henry Maudsley of London, however, claims that we only speak metaphorically when we make such statements. He firmly maintains there is no repository in which ideas are stored up; and declares when an idea which we have once had is excited again, that there is simply a reproduction of the same nervous current, with the conscious addition that it is a reproduction. Psychology, he claims, affords no help in our efforts to understand this faculty of memory; because physiologically considered, the condition of memory is "the organic process by which nerve-experiences in the different centers are registered, and to recollect is to revive these experiences in the highest centers - to stimulate, by external or internal causes, their residua, aptitudes, dispositions, or whatever else we may choose to call them, into functual activity."

If Dr. Maudsley is correct in this, though I do not accept his conclusion, still I maintain, the position of the psychologist to discipline the mental mechanism so as to stimulate and awaken this functual activity in the highest nerve cen ters, embraces the same thought as that of carrying discipline to a point that all we give memory to hold may be arranged or tabulated. And, therefore, this awakening or disciplining can be further carried to such perfection that, no matter how long the interval may be since we placed that word, idea or thought in memory's cabinet, when we have need of it, it will present itself instantaneously. Having lifted ourselves to this unfoldment, to learn language would be a joyous pastime, and knowledge once culled, would be consciously forever retained. Our training has started us on the way; and, to advance as one's desires prompt, we should recognize first that this goal can be attained. To educate perception to this point I claim is the primary work, and the task is not a light one. If the progress in mental development in the past century, particularly in the last third of that century, teaches anything, it is that phenomenal unfoldment has been made. If the logic of the mental trend for the same period records any finality, it is the conviction that we have only commenced to take over the heritage of infinite power resident in our selfhoods. If our conception of ultimate man is to be drawn from the growth so recorded, then we have reached a period where to ques tion any abridgment of man 's mental scope is illogical.